Murray Kempton Quotes

United States, Journalist
December 16, 1917 – May, 5, 1997.

James Murray Kempton was an American journalist and social and political commentator. He won a National Book Award in 1974 (category, "Contemporary Affairs") for The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. Reprinted, 1997, with new subtitle The Trial of the Panther 21.) He won a Pulitzer Prize (category, "Commentary") in 1985 "for witty and insightful reflection on public issues in 1984 and throughout a distinguished career."

Also known as Political Commentator

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

Murray Kempton
- Persons
- Martyr
- Scourge
Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

Murray Kempton
- Trying
- Doctrine
- Exterior

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

Murray Kempton
- Scoundrels
- Uninteresting
A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.

Murray Kempton
- Accepting
- Harder
- Beens
Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.

Murray Kempton
America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

Murray Kempton
There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.

Murray Kempton
- Children
- Building
- Tigers
A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Murray Kempton

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

Murray Kempton
We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse.

Murray Kempton
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

Murray Kempton