Quotes from Murray Kempton

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being alone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon flight from reality. (frm "Part of Our Time, Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties," about American Communist movement.)

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.

The student movement's leaders and followers were together victims and propagators of a legend. We can see their illusion nowhere more clearly than in the requirement that the myth of a great student anti-fascist movement be sustained by the counter-myth of a serious student fascist conspiracy in opposition to it. The signal to arms requires an enemy; where none exists, he must be invented.