Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

Culture more than politics determines the success of the society, but politics can save the culture.

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

If you change the society and a culture, the politics will follow.

I think we've seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change.

What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.

I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country.

My audience is much more center right, or centrist.

A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, and a libertarian is a conservative who's been indicted.

When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

I think culture precedes politics, and I think the attempts to try and legislate people's behavior... isn't going to be productive until the culture decides what they want to achieve.

I think the ideology of the Congress is closest to mine. Congress is a party where I should be. I have joined politics to bring change in society. The Congress gave me a chance with the Aadhaar project. It's a party that will allow me to bring change.

Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

I was never a left-winger, actually. I was a pretend left-winger because it was more interesting than being a right-winger.

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

I'm pretty middle-of-the-road. There are some issues I'm more conservative on.

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.

It is one of the truisms of politics that a conservative is often enough a former liberal who has been 'mugged by reality.'

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.