To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
Murray KemptonAs an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.
Murray KemptonIt is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.
Murray KemptonThere is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.
Murray KemptonIt is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.
Murray KemptonBy adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
Murray Kempton