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 single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
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.
There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.
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?
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.
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.
The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.
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.
Secrecy is for losers.
The status quo is working.
To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.
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.
The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having...