Daniel Patrick Moynihan quotes

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an American politician, sociologist, and diplomat who served four terms as a U.S. Senator from New York. Known for his thought leadership, he played a major role in shaping domestic policy and public debates on welfare and social issues. He is remembered for his incisive analyses and significant influence on American political life. Here are 20 of his quotes:

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan)
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. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
What is not discussed, will not be advanced. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young. View quote
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. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
[T]he nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it. On the other hand, such was the power of the anticolonial idea that great powers from outside a region had relatively little influence unless they were prepared to use force. China altogether backed Fretilin in Timor, and lost. In Spanish Sahara, Russia just as completely backed Algeria, and its front, known as Polisario, and lost. In both instances the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan)
The mudslinging has begun. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A case can be made... that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't realize how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in a mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought he had a little more time. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder -- most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
However, proceedings of a Senate Intelligence Committee in 1980 attribute the identical quote to James R. Schlesinger (at p. 110), possibly made during the course of 1973 Congressional testimony. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan