Top 40 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Featured in: Honesty Quotes

2. “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

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

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

4. “What is not discussed, will not be advanced.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

5. “The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

6. “When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

7. “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.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

8. “No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

9. “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

10. “Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

11. “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

12. “In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

13. “Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

14. “At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

15. “Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

16. “Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, ‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

17. “The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

18. “The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

19. “We’ve come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

20. “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

21. “Secrecy is for losers.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

22. “The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

23. “If you don’t have 30 years to devote to social policy, don’t get involved.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

24. “People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

25. “The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

26. “The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

27. “The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

29. “The status quo is working.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

30. “As the family goes, so go the children.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

31. “If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

32. “In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn’t have done greater damage than some of what we see today.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

33. “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

34. “To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

35. “A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

36. “The Lord looks after drunks and Americans.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

37. “It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

39. “A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

41. “The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

42. “What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses?”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

43. “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

44. “The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

45. “It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

46. “Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You’d think that would be pretty obvious.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

47. “The world’s largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having...”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan