Daniel Patrick Moynihan

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.

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

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.

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

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.

The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life.

We must not let ourselves be seen as rushing around the world looking for arguments... Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th century. Nor will it serve in the 21st.

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.

We used to play marbles for keeps. If you lost, you lost. It is the same way with politics, but not everybody knows this.

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.

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

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

...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.