Max Lerner quotes

Max Lerner was an American journalist, educator, and noted public intellectual. His writings addressed issues of democracy, freedom, and social justice in the United States. He influenced generations of readers with his columns and books on politics and society. Here are 31 of his quotes:

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors. (Max Lerner)
When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil. View quote
Max Lerner
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. View quote
Max Lerner
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. View quote
Max Lerner
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace. View quote
Max Lerner
Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts. View quote
Max Lerner
The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little. View quote
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. View quote
Max Lerner
To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others. View quote
Max Lerner
To reject the word is to reject the human search. View quote
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 male. (Max Lerner)
A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride. View quote
Max Lerner
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it. View quote
Max Lerner
Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent. View quote
Max Lerner
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea. View quote
Max Lerner
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope. View quote
Max Lerner
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. View quote
Max Lerner
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search. View quote
Max Lerner
The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence. View quote
Max Lerner
A world technology means either a world government or world suicide. View quote
Max Lerner
In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions. (Max Lerner)
When you are seventeen you aren't really serious. View quote
Max Lerner
A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician. View quote
Max Lerner
We should be less concerned about the missile gap than the intelligence gap... less worried about the missile race than the intelligence race. View quote
Max Lerner
I have believed in love and work, and their linkage. I have believed that we are neither angels nor devils, but humans, with clusters of potentials in both directions. I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist. View quote
Max Lerner

Max Lerner

Occupation: American Journalist
Born: December 20, 1902
Died: June 5, 1992
Quotes count: 31
Wikipedia: Max Lerner

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