Murray Kempton Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

Murray Kempton
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.

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

Murray Kempton
We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

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

Murray Kempton
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.

Murray Kempton
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.

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

Murray Kempton
It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.

Murray Kempton
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.

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

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

Murray Kempton
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.

Murray Kempton
Always pretend to be stupid; then when you have to show yourself smart, the display has the additional effect of surprise.

Murray Kempton
Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon.

Murray Kempton
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

Murray Kempton
Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.

Murray Kempton
Hollywood is a place where there is no definition of your worth earlier than your last picture.

Murray Kempton
To have no sense of sin is to have no taste, and to have no taste is to be a loser at the end.

Murray Kempton
Every now and then, in the course of great events, the elements of tradition and innovation ally themselves and each other's weakness supplements the other and together they achieve the perfect debacle.

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

Murray Kempton
The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.

Murray Kempton
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.

Murray Kempton