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

- Max Lerner

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

- Max Lerner

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.

- Max Lerner

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…

- Max Lerner

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

- Max Lerner

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

- Max Lerner

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

- Max Lerner

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

- Max Lerner

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 mal…

- Max Lerner