Quotes from Max Lerner

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

When choosing the lesser of two evils, always remember, it is still an evil.

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.

Every man has two counties--his own and America.

To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperment, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work---surrounds them with a sensuous life-- and cuts them off from the normal sources of living.

Americans live in a twilight world between a sense of loss and a sense of resigned acceptance.

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.

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.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

God is what man finds that is divine in himself. God is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.

What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal, but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there-or failing to get there.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea

Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.