It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side - we are doing very well - and the other things are not solving - they're compounding.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

entitled opinion facts

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

freedom truth education

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

women growing-up relationship

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

break heart world

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

liberty political government

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

agency healthy government

Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

marriage family children

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

constitution too-much government

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

welfare-programs taken past

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

jail country people

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

robbers robber-baron radical

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

government important world

The principal objective of American government at every level should be to

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

marriage government children

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

society change culture

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

citizens liberty desire

The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

capacity-to-love understanding men

There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

mistake

Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

inner-peace government energy

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

hopeful perfect thinking

At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

deterioration fabric heart