Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.Collection: Equality
The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life.Collection: Family
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.Collection: Politics
The Democrats have prevailed because, at heart, we have embodied a great idea, which is that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people; that government can embrace great causes and do great things.Collection: Government
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.Collection: Intelligence
The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.Collection: Government
We used to play marbles for keeps. If you lost, you lost. It is the same way with politics, but not everybody knows this.Collection: Politics
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.
If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.
We must not let ourselves be seen as rushing around the world looking for arguments... Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th century. Nor will it serve in the 21st.
The principle of not negotiating with terrorists is the only thing we can hold on to.
It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side - we are doing very well - and the other things are not solving - they're compounding.
If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.
The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
I did not have a lot of spare time after I was about eleven because in my youth, young people used to try to find ways of making money after school. From about age eleven on, I either shined shoes or did something such.
Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.
Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
In 1914, there were two countries in the world that required you to have a passport if you wanted to enter - Czarist Russia and the Ottomans. Anywhere else, you could come and go as you pleased.
Welfare became a term of opprobrium - a contentious, often vindictive area of political conflict in which liberals and conservatives clashed and children were lost sight of.
In my view - which could be wrong, but it is my field - there is no better formula for social instability than to divide a society between two ascribed characteristics that are seen as opposite.
I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.
I come from a part of the world - raised in a part of the world where you're born a Democrat, baptized a Democrat.
I was more in opposition within my own party, and for a long while, I was part of the opposition. I had - Scoop Jackson was my candidate in '76. I made no bones about that.
We have to ask if it is once again the summer of 1914. Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could lead to cataclysm as they did in Sarajevo.
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.Collection: Facts
There is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.Collection: Relationship
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.Collection: Heart
There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.Collection: Mistake
I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.Collection: Government
Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.Collection: Thinking
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.Collection: Country
I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?Collection: Radical
In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn't have done greater damage than some of what we see today.Collection: Government
The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.Collection: Men
The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.Collection: Government
To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.Collection: Loss
A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.Collection: Responsible Government
One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.Collection: Mean
Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.Collection: People
Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.Collection: Heart
The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.Collection: Atmosphere
When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.Collection: Country
What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses?Collection: Winning
...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.Collection: Sex
It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments.Collection: Pride
The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.Collection: Children
The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.Collection: Debtors