Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihanwas an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected three times. He declined to run for re-election in 2000. Prior to his years in the Senate, Moynihan was the United States' Ambassador to the United Nations and to India, and was a member of four successive presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of John F. Kennedy, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth16 March 1927
CountryUnited States of America
Daniel Patrick Moynihan quotes about
The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.
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.
The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.
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.
Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
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.
Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'