Murray Kempton Quotes

Murray Kempton delivers sharp, witty takes on movies, city life, and morality, perfect for anyone craving a little bite of reality.

17 quotes

  1. 'One does not attend this movie [The Ten Commandments]; one enlists in it.'

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

  3. 'Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon.'

  4. 'If you talk to gangsters long enough, you'll find out that they're just as bad as respectable people.'

  5. 'In baseball, the true class enemy is not the boss, but the fan.'

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

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

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

  11. 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.

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

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

  14. 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.

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

  16. 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.

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