Max Lerner Quotes

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled?

A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

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.

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.

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

We must face what we fear; that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.

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.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.

American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.

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.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.

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.

Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

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.

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.

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.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

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.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

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.

There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.

To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperment, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work
surrounds them with a sensuous life
and cuts them off from the normal sources of living.

What counted was not the facts but the fears.

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.

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.

Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.

Every man has two counties
his own and America.

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

When choosing the lesser of two evils, always remember, it is still an evil.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.