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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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Max Lerner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1902
Born: December 20
Died: 1992
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Мінск
Given
Gratitude
Waving
Nothing
Friendship
Tooth
Mean
Americans
Forgetting
Would
Danger
Flag
Unless
Freely
Forget
Flags
Less
Teeth
Fatuous
Means
Relation
Extract

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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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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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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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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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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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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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The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
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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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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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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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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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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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I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.
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To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
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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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I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
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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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The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.
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The Russians train they do not dare educate.
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