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I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

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
Needs
Democrat
Things
Group
World
Groups
Clear
Less
Government
Need
Important

More quotes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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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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Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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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
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The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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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
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The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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The principal objective of American government at every level should be to see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn't have done greater damage than some of what we see today.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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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
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If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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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
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It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan