Quotes from Murray Kempton

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

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.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

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

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.

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.

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

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

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

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.

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

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

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.

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.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war and shoots the injured.

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse.