Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of "benign neglect."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinced that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Welfare became a term of opprobrium—a contentious, often vindictive area of political conflict in which liberals and conservatives clashed and children were lost sight of.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A case can be made... that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't realize how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in a mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan