Max Lerner Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

Max Lerner
We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather, and your own rate of living.

Max Lerner
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.

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

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

Max Lerner
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

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

Max Lerner
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.

Max Lerner
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.

Max Lerner
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.

Max Lerner
There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.

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

Max Lerner
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.

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

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

Max Lerner
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.

Max Lerner
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.

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

Max Lerner
Power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like Harvey, was to recognize its existence and subject it to scientific study.

Max Lerner
We must rid ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry; they need no inner logical structure to be effective.

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

Max Lerner
God is what man finds that is divine in himself. God is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.

Max Lerner
Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.

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

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

Max Lerner
What is dangerous about the tranquilizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.

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

Max Lerner