Murray Kempton
Journalist
1917-12-16
Quotes by Murray Kempton
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No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.
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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.
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The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.
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The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.
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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.
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A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.
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To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.
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To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
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It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.
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A political convention is just not a place from which you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
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There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.
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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.
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A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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