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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
Privilege
Morality
Vested
Humanity
Confuse
Enemy
Identify
Interest
Enemies
Ethics
Interests

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I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
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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.
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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.
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We must face what we fear that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.
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In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
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The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
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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.
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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.
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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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Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
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We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
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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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A people's speech is the skin of its culture.
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Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.
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