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

Max Lerner

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Max Lerner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1902
Born: December 20
Died: 1992
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Мінск
Pessimist
Optimist
Neither
Possibility

More quotes by Max Lerner

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The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
Max Lerner
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In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
Max Lerner
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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.
Max Lerner
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Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.
Max Lerner
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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
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We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
Max Lerner
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Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
Max Lerner
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When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
Max Lerner
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America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.
Max Lerner
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The Russians train they do not dare educate.
Max Lerner
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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
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The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.
Max Lerner
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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
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America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.
Max Lerner
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We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
Max Lerner
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Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.
Max Lerner
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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.
Max Lerner
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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.
Max Lerner
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God is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.
Max Lerner
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The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
Max Lerner