91 Quotes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

In my view - which could be wrong, but it is my field - there is no better formula for social instability than to divide a society between two ascribed characteristics that are seen as opposite.

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

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 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.

Welfare became a term of opprobrium - a contentious, often vindictive area of political conflict in which liberals and conservatives clashed and children were lost sight of.

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.

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.

We have to ask if it is once again the summer of 1914. Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could lead to cataclysm as they did in Sarajevo.