If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
– 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.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.