Quotes from Max Lerner

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

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

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

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: Concentrated Power of the Big Press. Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. Governmental control of the press. Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. Big Business mentality. Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. Social blindness.

We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.

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