Murray Kempton Quotations

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.

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.

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

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

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.

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

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.

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

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

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.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

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

The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.

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

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

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.

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

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.

It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.

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

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

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

Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.