Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”

“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 ourselves in the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th century. Nor will it serve in the 21st.”

“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 thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.”

“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 States for generations.”

“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 government can embrace great causes and do great things.”

“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 pleased.”

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

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

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

“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 shoes or did something such.”

“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.”

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

“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 like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.”

“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.”

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

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

“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.”

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

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