DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

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.

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

If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.

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

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

… the greatest act of civic vandalism in New York’s history.

We have defined decency down.

Communism is not immortal; it is impossible. It doesn’t work.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines.

Expect little of government, especially national government.

If you build a stadium, you don’t build a school. Indeed, you don’t build fifty schools.

If you don’t have thirty years for a problem, don’t get involved in social policy.

The defining mode of conflict in the era ahead is ethnic conflict.

The Social Security System is the one great social policy achievement of the twentieth century.

We should take a look at our tax system every 75 years or so.

A dangerous place.

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

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

A large capacity to tolerate atrocity does not imply an unlimited capacity.

A third of all the children born today will be on welfare.

You must understand that Americans are a warrior nation.

Americans are used to the clatter of campaign promises hitting ground as they are thrown out the window.

... an auction of the treasury.

Anything we have not done in the next century will be our own fault because we have so many resources to do it.

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