I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.
Max LernerScience itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.
Max LernerEvery step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.
Max LernerDo not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerMan must be at once more humble and more confident; more humble in the face of destructive potentials of what he can achieve, more confident of his own humanity as against computers and robots which are only engines to simulate him.
Max LernerThe crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max LernerHaving a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
Max LernerAmerican capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.
Max LernerMeiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled?
Max LernerYou may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
Max LernerThere are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.
Max LernerThe way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.
Max LernerPower politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like Harvey, was to recognize its existence and subject it to scientific study.
Max LernerTo deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
Max LernerAmerica shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.
Max LernerThe turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
Max LernerThe politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
Max LernerA politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician
Max LernerThe fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
Max LernerThe problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
Max LernerThere are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.
Max LernerIn our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
Max LernerWhat is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace of mind with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.
Max LernerWe demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
Max LernerAmerica is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.
Max LernerWe cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
Max LernerNext to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.
Max LernerThe tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
Max LernerThe Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: - Concentrated Power of the Big Press. - Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. - Governmental control of the press. - Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. - Big Business mentality. - Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. - Social blindness.
Max LernerGod is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.
Max LernerThere is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.
Max LernerEvery mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.
Max LernerWhen evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
Max Lerner