Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes & Sayings

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

As the family goes, so go the children. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government. — 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 United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults. — 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

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?' — 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

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals? — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses? — 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

At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place. — 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

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

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The principal objective of American government at every level should be to
see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

There is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist ... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make. — 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

Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each
other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

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

Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils. — 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

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The Lord looks after drunks and Americans. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Secrecy is for losers ... It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive 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

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young 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 — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I have no doubt that there will continue to be bumps, some serious crises indeed in our relationship with China ... Neither membership in the WTO nor normalized trade relations with the United States will magically impose the rule of law on China or institute deep-seeded respect for human rights. But it certainly has potential to advance those purposes. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The status quo is working. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Secrecy is for losers. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts. — 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

Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

What is not discussed, will not be advanced. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having ... — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The work of democratic government is routinely concerned with matters defined as troubles. In "The Presidency and the Press" I make the point, familiar to anyone who has flown about the world much, that the best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society of some sort. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan