Max Lerner Quotes - Page 2

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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.

  Max Lerner

  Memories, Science, Names

  Max Lerner (1992). “Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era”, p.96, Transaction Publishers

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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.

  Max Lerner

  Stupid, Character, Ethos

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

  Max Lerner

  Humanity, Enemy, Privilege

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

  Max Lerner

  Perfection, Political, Demand

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• 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.

  Max Lerner

  Men, World, Destruction

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• There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.

  Max Lerner

  Ambition, Vanity, Spy

  Max Lerner (1959). “The unfinished country: a book of American symbols”

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

  Max Lerner

  Ignorance, Men, Civilization

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

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• When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

  Max Lerner

  Teenage, Serious, Adolescence

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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.

  Max Lerner

  Struggle, Men, Religion

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

  Max Lerner

  War, Way, Energy

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• The Russians train; they do not dare educate.

  Max Lerner

  Dare, Educate, Train

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

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

  Max Lerner

  Suicide, Mean, Technology

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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.

  Max Lerner

  Military, War, Giving

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• 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.

  Max Lerner

  Ideas, America, Competition

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• I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.

  Max Lerner

  Simple, Temptation, Principles

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

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• The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

  Max Lerner

  Travel, Moving, Greatness

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

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• Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

  Max Lerner

  Heart, Men, Brain

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• If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.

  Max Lerner

  Mean, Decision, Unions

  "Lou Dobbs Tonight", www.cnn.com. November 14, 2003.

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• A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician

  Max Lerner

  Dream, Politician, Columnists

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• It is almost as easy to be enervated by triumph as by defeat.

  Max Lerner

  Success, Triumph, Defeat

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

  Max Lerner

  Knights, American Capitalism, Robber Baron

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• 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.

  Max Lerner

  Science, Ethos, Used

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• 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.

  Max Lerner

  Humble, Men, Humanity

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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.

  Max Lerner

  Collective Effort, Sky, Pie

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• 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.

  Max Lerner

  Rights, Mind, Principles

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