Top 20 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

The principle of not negotiating with terrorists is the only thing we can hold on to.

If you don’t have 30 years to devote to social policy, don’t get involved.

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.

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.

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.

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.

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.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.