MURRAY KEMPTON

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

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.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

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.

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

Given free play, the best policemen act badly more often than not, which is why they are given free play on any large scale only when their employers discern some social utility in their acting badly.

I have always found Franklin Delano Roosevelt an amusing fellow, but I would not employ him, except for reasons of personal friendships, as a geek in a common carnival.

There are things a man must not do to save a nation.

Mr. Nixon … will, with time, be a landmark in the history of quiet, determined desperation.

Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon.

In the end, I did not feel any cleaner than he was … I pretended once again now and then that [Senator Joseph] McCarthy was not a serious man; but I always knew that the devil in me and the larger devil in him were very consequential figures indeed

The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse.

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.

It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.