Murray Kempton
Murray Kempton
James Murray Kemptonwas an influential American journalist and social and political commentator. He won a National Book Award in 1974for The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. Reprinted, 1997, with new subtitle The Trial of the Panther 21.) He won a Pulitzer Prizein 1985 "for witty and insightful reflection on public issues in 1984 and throughout a distinguished career."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth16 December 1917
CountryUnited States of America
The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.
Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.
We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.
A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.
The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.
To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.
The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.
To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.
A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.
Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.