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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

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Max Lerner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1902
Born: December 20
Died: 1992
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Мінск
Enemies
Ethics
Interests
Privilege
Morality
Humanity
Vested
Enemy
Confuse
Interest
Identify

More quotes by Max Lerner

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American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
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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.
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America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A people's speech is the skin of its culture.
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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.
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Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
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To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
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A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.
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In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
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I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.
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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