Max Lerner Quotes
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To reject the word is to reject the human search.
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Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
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I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
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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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The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
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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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The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.
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Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.
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We must face what we fear; that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.
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There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.
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A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.
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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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To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
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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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When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
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Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled?
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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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In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
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The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
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The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
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When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.
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Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
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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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Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.