Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
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.
Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects.
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.
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.
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.
I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?
At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.
The principal objective of American government at every level should be to see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.
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 American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.
The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn't have done greater damage than some of what we see today.
Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
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.
To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.
People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.
Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.
Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.
If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.
Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'
The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.
What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses?
The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.
The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.
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.
No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.
