Max Lerner Quotes

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

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

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

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. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.

What counted was not the facts but the fears.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: - Concentrated Power of the Big Press. - Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. - Governmental control of the press. - Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. - Big Business mentality. - Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. - Social blindness.

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.

In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice racism then it is racism we teach.

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

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.

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

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.

In our culture we make heroes of the men who sit on top of a heap of money, and we pay attention not only to what they say in their field of competence, but to their wisdom on every other question in the world.

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

A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

We must face what we fear; that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.

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

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.

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

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.