Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.”

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

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

“In 1914, there were two countries in the world that required you to have a passport if you wanted to enter - Czarist Russia and the Ottomans. Anywhere else, you could come and go as you plea...”

“I come from a part of the world - raised in a part of the world where you're born a Democrat, baptized a Democrat.”

“I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you lik...”

“In my view - which could be wrong, but it is my field - there is no better formula for social instability than to divide a society between two ascribed characteristics that are seen as oppos...”

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

“It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic s...”

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

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

“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.”

“I did not have a lot of spare time after I was about eleven because in my youth, young people used to try to find ways of making money after school. From about age eleven on, I either shined...”

“The Democrats have prevailed because, at heart, we have embodied a great idea, which is that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people; that governme...”

“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 oursel...”

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

“The principle of not negotiating with terrorists is the only thing we can hold on to.”

“The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United State...”

“If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always tho...”