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The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Age: 76 †
Born: 1927
Born: March 16
Died: 2003
Died: March 26
Diplomat
Former United States Senator
Military Personnel
Politician
Sociologist
Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Daniel Patrick Pat Moynihan
Daniel Patrick
Liberty
Competence
Politics
Libertarianism
Political
Encounter
Government
Encounters
Thing
Libertarian
Rare
Exciting
Single
More quotes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
There is one unmistakable lesson in American history a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
As the family goes, so go the children.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
