Murray Kempton Quotes
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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.
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It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.
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No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.
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Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.
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America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.
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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.
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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.
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A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.
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A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
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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.
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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.