Top 23 Quotes by Max Lerner

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

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

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

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

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.

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.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

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.

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