Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

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

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 - that community asks for and gets chaos.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

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

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.

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.

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

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

What is not discussed, will not be advanced.

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.

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.

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

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.

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.

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.

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.

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