Quotes by Max Lerner

“The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.”

“I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.”

“When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.”

“We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.”

“When you are seventeen you arent really serious.”

“The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.”

“The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea”

“You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.”

“The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.”

“Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.”

What counted was not the facts but the fears.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Every man has two counties--his own and America.

God is what man finds that is divine in himself. God is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.

What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace with it you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.

Despite the success cult men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there-or failing to get there.

I have a simple principle for the conduct of life - never to resist an adequate temptation.

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.