Max Lerner Quotes
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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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Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
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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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In our culture we make heroes of the men who sit on top of a heap of money, and we pay attention not only to what they say in their field of competence, but to their wisdom on every other question in the world.
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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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There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.
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American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.
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What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace of mind with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.
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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 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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Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.
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The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
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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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A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
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God is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.
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There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.
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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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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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I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.
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Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.
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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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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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If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.
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Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.