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.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Effort, Success, Trying
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Power
When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Evil, Integrity
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core strength within you that survives all hurt.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Adversity
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.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Censorship
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.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Time Management, Time
The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Aging, Age
I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Potential, Possibilities
A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Presidency
Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Help, Cooperation
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.
—Max Lerner
Topics: God, Divinity, Faith
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
—Max Lerner
When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Evil
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.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Tourism, Travel
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.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Men
When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Integrity, Evil
Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
—Max Lerner
Topics: Youth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert Reich American Economist, Political Commentator
- Abraham Maslow American Psychologist
- Kirk Douglas American Actor
- Abbie Hoffman American Political Activist
- Vernon Howard American Spiritual Teacher
- John Cage American Composer
- Stephen Jay Gould American Paleontologist
- Joseph Campbell American Mythologist, Writer
- Emma Goldman American Anarchist
- E. L. Doctorow American Writer
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