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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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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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 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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The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
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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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To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
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In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
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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 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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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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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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When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
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Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
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When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.
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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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Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.