Explore Quotes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

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.

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

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.

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.

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 issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

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

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

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

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

Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each_x000D__x000D_other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects.

The principal objective of American government at every level should be to_x000D__x000D_see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.

As the family goes, so go the children.

...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.

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

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