Murray Kempton Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting. — Murray Kempton

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

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

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

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

Each of us lives with a sword over his head.
There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality. — Murray Kempton

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

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up. — 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 not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him. — 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

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

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew. — Murray Kempton

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

The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being alone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon flight from reality. (frm "Part of Our Time, Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties," about American Communist movement.) — Murray Kempton

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse. — Murray Kempton

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

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

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

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

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