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:

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.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

What is not discussed, will not be advanced.

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.

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.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The mudslinging has begun.

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.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

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.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan