Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

The number killed I cannot say. It was a perfect butchery.

The old fool has taken more lives in that naked country than I have taken for the murder of my father.

There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.

Few of us will forget the wail of mingled grief, rage and horror which rose from the camp when the Indians returned to it and recognized their slaughtered warriors, women, and children.

People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.

If you really kill, you don't want to talk about it.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

For the most part fraud in the end secures for its companions repentance and shame.

You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

I lied for years and years. And the thing about lies and secrets is that they eat you alive from the inside. I would not wish that pain on anyone.

I hurt my wife, my kids, my mother, my wife's family, my friends, my foundation and kids all around the world who admired me.

Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.

The Bolshevik Smidovich gave a written promise to spare the lives of those Junkers who surrendered, and then allowed the prisoners to be beaten to death one by one. … General Dukhonin surrendered to Krylenko, who in turn offered Dukhonin no protection as he was torn limb from limb before his very eyes. The murderers remained unpunished.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It's so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you're also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it's just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.

I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.

That period afterwards, just hating being the winner of the Tour de France, hating cycling, hating the media for asking me questions about Lance Armstrong.

Daniel had ruined that couple’s life. Killed their daughter. All because he’d been some hotshot angel who saw something he wanted and went after it.

Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man ... , keep alive for yourselves.

Dishonor is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.

Could he with reason murmur at his case, Himself sole author of his own disgrace?

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.