Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.

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.

So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible.

As the family goes, so go the children.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.

If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts.

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.

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

The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.

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.

The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.

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.

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

...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.

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

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.

Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.

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.

It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.

People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.

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

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.

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.

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.

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.

Secrecy is for losers.

Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.

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.

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.

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.

At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.

Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'