Quotes from Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.

To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.

It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side - we are doing very well - and the other things are not solving - they're compounding.

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Welfare became a term of opprobrium - a contentious, often vindictive area of political conflict in which liberals and conservatives clashed and children were lost sight of.

At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

We have to ask if it is once again the summer of 1914. Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could lead to cataclysm as they did in Sarajevo.

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

The Democrats have prevailed because, at heart, we have embodied a great idea, which is that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people; that government can embrace great causes and do great things.

The principle of not negotiating with terrorists is the only thing we can hold on to.

I come from a part of the world - raised in a part of the world where you're born a Democrat, baptized a Democrat.

I was more in opposition within my own party, and for a long while, I was part of the opposition. I had - Scoop Jackson was my candidate in '76. I made no bones about that.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

We must not let ourselves be seen as rushing around the world looking for arguments... Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th century. Nor will it serve in the 21st.

In 1914, there were two countries in the world that required you to have a passport if you wanted to enter - Czarist Russia and the Ottomans. Anywhere else, you could come and go as you pleased.

In my view - which could be wrong, but it is my field - there is no better formula for social instability than to divide a society between two ascribed characteristics that are seen as opposite.

If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.

I did not have a lot of spare time after I was about eleven because in my youth, young people used to try to find ways of making money after school. From about age eleven on, I either shined shoes or did something such.

If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.