Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Secrecy is for losers.Collection: Loser
The status quo is working.Collection: Status Quo
The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.Collection: Tasks
The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.Collection: War
Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently.Collection: Country
The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.Collection: Country
Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.Collection: Government
At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.Collection: Heart
We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts.Collection: Facts
The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.Collection: Breakup
As the family goes, so go the children.Collection: Marriage
A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.Collection: Elderly
The Lord looks after drunks and Americans.Collection: Looks
Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.Collection: Thinking
The work of democratic government is routinely concerned with matters defined as troubles. In "The Presidency and the Press" I make the point, familiar to anyone who has flown about the world much, that the best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society of some sort. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men.Collection: Men
No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.Collection: Guilty
People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.Collection: People
Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.Collection: People
If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.Collection: Mind
Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.Collection: War
I have no doubt that there will continue to be bumps, some serious crises indeed in our relationship with China.... Neither membership in the WTO nor normalized trade relations with the United States will magically impose the rule of law on China or institute deep-seeded respect for human rights. But it certainly has potential to advance those purposes.Collection: Rights
At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.Collection: Children
Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.Collection: Simple
We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.Collection: Heart
Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'Collection: Complaining
It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.Collection: Goal