Max Lerner Quotes

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

What counted was not the facts but the fears.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

The 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.

There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

We must face what we fear; that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice racism then it is racism we teach.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.

The 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.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

Next 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.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man.

Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.

God 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.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

Science 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.

It is almost as easy to be enervated by triumph as by defeat.

Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.

A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

The Russians train; they do not dare educate.

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.

There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.