Murray Kempton famous quotes

03-28-2025

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
-- Murray Kempton

#Political #Where You Come #Politics
Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.
-- Murray Kempton

#Commitment #Journey #Degrees
America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.
-- Murray Kempton

#America #Economic #Economic Systems
The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.
-- Murray Kempton

#Sin #Communism #Communist
To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.
-- Murray Kempton

#Gentleman #Cameras #Oneself
It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.
-- Murray Kempton

#Martyr #Burned #Persons
There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.
-- Murray Kempton

#Men #Patriotism
A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.
-- Murray Kempton

#Leader #Revolution #Unbroken
Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.
-- Murray Kempton

#War #Fire #Battle
The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.
-- Murray Kempton

#Sacrifice #Reality #World
There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.
-- Murray Kempton

#Children #Men #Earth
As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.
-- Murray Kempton

#Names #Political #Enemy
It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.
-- Murray Kempton

#Winning #America #Long
The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.
-- Murray Kempton

#New York #Games #People
The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.
-- Murray Kempton

#Fate #Reality #Destiny
It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.
-- Murray Kempton

#Philosophy #Government #Demand
A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.
-- Murray Kempton

#War #Critics #Wounded
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
-- Murray Kempton

#Mother #Children #Real
To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
-- Murray Kempton

#Thinking #Ideas #Fashionable
A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.
-- Murray Kempton

#Beats #Neighborhood
No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.
-- Murray Kempton

#Scoundrels
The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.
-- Murray Kempton

#Strong #Commitment #Lasting
A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.
-- Murray Kempton

#Men #Evil #Looks

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