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

Quotes to Explore
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No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically … I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.
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I think I always had a musicality, and I think I could tell a good song from a bad song. And I would appreciate hearing something that was new to me.
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She had a body that even I coveted in a strictly Platonic sense.
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Life was like a batch of biscuits without the baking powder: flat, flat, flat.
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the fashion pages of magazines such as Cosmopolitan now seem to specialize in telling the career girl what to wear to charm the particular wrong type of man who reads Playboy, while the editorial pages tell her how to cope with the resulting psychic damage.
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Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.
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I produced a play in New York that got nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best American Play.The play is called Stalking The Bogeyman. It was a story on This American Life, and my former roommate is the artistic director of the New York Repertory Theater. He heard the NPR show, contacted them, and essentially - shortest synopsis ever, like I'm the Cablevision guide button - it's the true story of a man stalking and plotting to kill the man who raped him when he was seven. It's by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.
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Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they got rid of their fears and worries.
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Vanity is a silly thing to be obsessed with because... it sounds cliché but it leads you to emptiness; it goes away.
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If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.
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I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree and climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
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Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.
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Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
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Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
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Sometimes it takes you longer for you to realize when a person doesn't have the best of intentions or when it is time to let a person go from your life.
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What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.
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It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.