Murray Kempton Quotes

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

There 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.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

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.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

As 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.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say I think that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.