Max Lerner Quotes - Page 3

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace of mind with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.

There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.

Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.

Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.

Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled?

God is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.