Quotes from Max Lerner

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.

It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man.

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.

Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

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.

Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.

What counted was not the facts but the fears.

We must face what we fear; that is the case of the core of the restoration of health.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

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.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.