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.

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

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.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

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

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

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.

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.