Max Lerner Quotes
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There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.
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The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
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In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.
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It is almost as easy to be enervated by triumph as by defeat.
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The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: - Concentrated Power of the Big Press. - Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. - Governmental control of the press. - Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. - Big Business mentality. - Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. - Social blindness.
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It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.
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America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.
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Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.
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The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
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What counted was not the facts but the fears.
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We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
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A people's speech is the skin of its culture.
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The Russians train; they do not dare educate.
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A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.
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Power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like Harvey, was to recognize its existence and subject it to scientific study.
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We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.
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Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.