Max Lerner Quotes
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A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician
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The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
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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.
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It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.
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The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.
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The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.
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You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
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America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.
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When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
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We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
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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.
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Man must be at once more humble and more confident; more humble in the face of destructive potentials of what he can achieve, more confident of his own humanity as against computers and robots which are only engines to simulate him.
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The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
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I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.
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A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
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What counted was not the facts but the fears.
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Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
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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.
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Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
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There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.
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Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
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The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
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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.
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Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.
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In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.
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It is almost as easy to be enervated by triumph as by defeat.
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Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.
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There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.
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It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man.
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Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.
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