Moynihan Quotes

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

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.

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

My predecessor in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to say, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.

Experience is the worst teacher. It gives the test before giving the lesson. —UNKNOWN

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own set of facts.

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: “To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.

Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinced that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. — DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN,

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. —Daniel Patrick Moynihan

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. He might have added that everyone is entitled to their own interpretations but not their own logic. When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts.

The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.

One does not part willingly with early loyalties or early traditions, and indeed the rolling years do but confirm them.

when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.

Personalizing successes sets people up for disastrous failure. They begin to treat the successes totally as a personal reflection of their abilities rather than the result of capitalizing on a good opportunity, being at the right place at the right time, or even being just plain lucky. They think their mere involvement in an undertaking guarantees success.

There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: 'Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan frostily replied, "You are entitled to you own opinion, but you are not entitled to you own facts.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. Everyone is not entitled, however, to their own facts

I want to change things for good. But sometimes, for things to get better, they first have to get worse.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.

The great scholar and senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said decades ago, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” —DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

You might be asking, “Why does Hillbilly Elegy sound kind of like the Moynihan Report?” One reason is that white Appalachians became persona non grata after the War on Poverty failed.

Fear is not weakness. It reminds us that we are human—with limitations. We are not gods. But, instead of hiding our fear, what if we faced it? For in facing what makes us afraid, we become stronger.

In 1993, New York’s Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart from shared standards.

Man is extremely uncomfortable with uncertainty. To deal with his discomfort, man tends to create a false sense of security by substituting certainty for uncertainty. It becomes the herd instinct. —BENNETT W. GOODSPEED, THE TAO JONES AVERAGES

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance.

One thing I’d learned over the years: always listen to your gut. And right now, my gut was chattering like a crazed squirrel.

In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.

Girl, tears are like Drano. They clear the emotions clogging your body. It's healthy to pour those suckers out once in a while.

Missing people is contagious, because it spreads through all the people you've ever missed.

Our secrets were many, our futures uncertain, but tonight—maybe just for tonight—we could lock it all up and be a girl and boy dancing the night away.

When the U.S. Senate was first conceived by the Founders, it was meant to be a forum for civilized debate. And for a long time it was, with scholars like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among its ranks. These were people of ideas who relished a good give-and-take, the clash of intellects, and the possibility of finding common ground. This is not the modern U.S. Senate, where debate is often confused with authoritative Ted Kennedy–style yelling.

For extra measure, [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan put another 'hold' on two other GOP favorites for federal courts of appeals, prompting White House counsel [Boyden] Gray made sure that [George H.] Bush knew that Moynihan had been blocking action on the appeals court nominations 'to extract a district court judge from us,' and he advised the president to sign the Sotomayor nomination but hold off making it official until the administration had gotten word that the two appeals court nominees were confirmed.

The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.” Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.” The

What is the therapeutic path? Is there one? How can we remedy a wound the size of existence? Of course, total recall— ecphoric excavation to the point of obsidian and diamantine repose—is the only therapeutic route. When presented with an infection such as a brain, eudemonia and euthanasia converge.

In 1967, the architect Lewis Mumford wrote of the human brain as a 'neural efflorescence' like those 'in the botanical realm', one of those 'extravagances and exuberances of nature' in which evolution overreaches itself: The very excess of 'brainness' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive trough inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it. This, he argued, must have proved maladaptive, thus endangering the survival of early humans. Nature's grandest flower was drooping under its own luxuriant weight. Mumford suggested that it was only by unloading and storing this 'hyperactivity' into 'cultural containers', damning up our sapient surplus in the supererogations of art and curiosity, that our species has avoided 'behaving like a racing motor that burns itself out for lack of a load'. But latent self-destructive potential still lurked just beneath the surface.

Nationalism is the political manifestation of a folk's collective unconscious; heathenism/ satanism is the spiritual manifestation. Both ascend from the same source. Its therefore no coincidence that occultism and nationalism/facism have both claimed common adherents prior to the present interest in both by youth.

The Negro Family” is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at the expense of black women. “Men must have jobs,” Moynihan wrote to President Johnson in 1965. “We must not rest until every able-bodied Negro male is working. Even if we have to displace some females.” Moynihan was evidently unconcerned that he might be arguing for propping up an order in which women were bound to men by a paycheck , in which “family” still meant the right of a husband to rape his wife and intramarital violence was still treated as a purely domestic and nonlegal matter.

In a memo dated September 17, 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Counselor to President Nixon for Urban Affairs, later Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and US Senator from New York, explained the science of change to Nixon’s Chief Domestic Advisor, John Ehrlichman, and warned that sea levels could rise “by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington. . .” Moynihan then went on to say that “it is possible to conceive fairly mammoth man-made efforts to countervail the CO2 rise (e.g., stop burning fossil fuels),” but that “in any event. . ., this is a subject that the Administration ought to get involved with.”48 The first report of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), published in 1970, devoted an entire chapter to climate change, including a section entitled “Energy output—A disappearing icecap?”49

In 1965, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that Black communities were caught in a tangle of pathology because our communities had a disproportionate number of female-led households, his conclusions had both affective and social dimensions. His 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” offered social and political recommendations focused on ways to help Black men become breadwinners again, so they could assume their “rightful” place at the head of Black families. But the affective goal of his infamous Moynihan Report was to shame Black women for the very mundane magic involved in our making a way out of no way. That shame persists well into the twenty-first century, when more than 70 percent of Black households are female-led. Black women have proportionally higher rates of abortion than any other group. There is no shame in having an abortion. I consider the right to choose the conditions under which one becomes a parent to be one of the most important social values. But I believe that decades of discourse about poor Black women and unwed Black mothers being “welfare queens,” who unfairly take more from the system than they put in, has shamed many Black women into not bearing children that they otherwise might consider having. The idea that only middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist and patriarchal.

Coitus and sleep—both relieving the discontinuity of spinal-priapic erection through collapse into horizontal submersion—represent attempts at ‘archaic’ regressions. During both, ‘the whole body assumes [a] spheroid shape’, recapitulating not just conditions in utero, but the morphologies of our pre-bilateral ancestors, the marine radiate. Ferenczi states, moreover, that the sleeper’s executive center, their ‘soul’, sinks back through nervous laminae, routing down from hibernating and deactivated encephalon into the proprioceptive spinal column. A katabasis of the CNS, sleeping is thus temporary decapitation: the somnolent ‘has only a “spinal soul”’, Ferenczi exclaims; evidence, then, of the sleeper’s ‘phylogenetic regression’ through neuronic layers. The ‘soul’ descends spinally from brain to thorax; a genuine recapitulation of precephalic existences. Dreams are spinal emissions. Sleep is time travel.

A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.

(Rand’s philosophy is called objectivism, coincidentally enough),

Only later did other scholars, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their perceptive book Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), highlight the enduring power that ethnic identifications—what one eats, who one marries, where one lives, how one votes—had in the lives of the American people.53

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.

Nixon finding areas of agreement with his Democratic adviser, as when Pat writes to him, “I do not know, but strongly suspect, that especially to working-class America, the misbehavior of [college] students is seen as a form of class privilege. Which it is.

a few liberals understood that the size and nature of Reagan’s landslide clearly indicated significant problems for the Democratic Party. Pat Moynihan said: “I’ll tell you what chills the blood of liberals. It was always thought that the old bastards were the conservatives. Now the young people are becoming the conservatives and we’re the old bastards.”66

Statistics can be made to prove anything – even the truth. Noël Moynihan

profitable trades” that are missed actually cost zero while poor controls (pick the stop later) or no controls (no stop) will sooner or later cost you a lot of money.

Specifically, they reference the work of Argyris and Schon on distinguishing between single and double-loop learning in both papers.72 Naot, Lipshitz, and Popper state that double loop learning is, “considered to be of higher quality because effective solution of some problems requires the examination of sensitive undiscussable issues, and the reframing of assumptions, values and goals.”73 Whereas single loop learning is more interested in a quick fix, double loop considers the larger context and works to shift organizational culture (values, beliefs, assumptions, etc.) when necessary to truly implement a lesson, and more importantly, change individual and organizational behavior. For example, Moynihan states, “The creation of the ICS can be considered an example of intercrisis double-loop learning, as it shows practitioners and policy makers questioning basic approaches to crisis response, and developing a new framework for future responses.”74

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a more rational debate about cholesterol, heart disease, or any other health problem is the simple fact that too many of the people we turn to for advice on such matters—our doctors—are tied to the makers of drugs. Sometimes those ties involve several hundred thousand dollars a year, sometimes just a few warm doughnuts. RAY MOYNIHAN AND ALAN CASSELS, SELLING SICKNESS Furthermore,

Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin of Uganda as a "racist murderer." The question is not whether Idi Amin is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - that is to say, administrations that were guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused someone of being a racist murderer.

Unfortunately, in the homeland security enterprise, practitioners are in the precarious position of being expected to know, or of having to have “done the planning,” for if they do not know or have not planned, how can U.S. citizens (and responders themselves) have confidence that they are secure? The trick is to move into a mindset of continual learning because as Moynihan states “Learning helps to manage uncertainty”113

Moynihan aponta que, ... Os profissionais, ..., têm um interesse investido no descontentamento, pois as pessoas descontentes voltam-se para os serviços profissionais em busca de alívio. Contudo, o mesmo princípio forma a base de todo o capitalismo moderno, o qual tenta continuamente criar novas demandas e novos descontentamentos, que só podem ser amenizados pelo consumo de mercadorias.

As former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, ' You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

the Howard speech is a prime example of what Moynihan calls “semantic infiltration.”20 This term refers to the appropriation of the language of one’s political opponents for the purpose of blurring distinctions and molding it to one’s own political position.

Moynihan: What do you say to those who attack you for attacking, for there is no other word for it, the decisions and actions of the pope? Viganó: It's not an attack on the Church, but a service given to the Church to testify to the truth, because only the truth may protect from the attack of the one who's treacherous, who puts us in danger constantly, the father of lies. This successor of the Apostle of Peter is not exempt from the attack of the devil. On the contrary, he may be the one most disposed to be targeted by the enemy, for to hit the head, the chief, would be an exceptional achievement for the devil because if you hit the pastor, the sheep will be dispersed--Matthew 14.

I won’t give up. It’s just . . . harder than I thought.” “Anything worth fighting for always is,

To the hopeless and oppressed, to the weary souls and heavy-hearted: You are worthy.

It’s a reminder that beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places. And there, she can thrive, even among those who would tear her apart.

But that was the crazy thing about hope. It was stupidly persistent.

This. This. Could all be gone in a blink of an eye. I hadn’t cherished the small moments, the moments that brought tiny glimmers of peace, joy, and happiness. Maybe I hadn’t been free, but I’d been alive. And I should have lived every second to the fullest.I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Starting now, I would live each moment as if it were my last.

Despite everything we’d been through together, I wanted to kill him right now.

Surveys have repeatedly shown that blacks and whites use drugs at remarkably comparable rates. Moynihan

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

But this time I was in control. His hooves tore up the road, clods of dirt spraying in his wake. The wind whipped my hair free of its bindings and dark red locks streamed behind me. I threw my head back and whooped to the sky. I embraced the danger, I craved the adrenaline, I needed the speed. And, for a moment of suspended time, I pretended that I was flying. Even more, I pretended that I was free.

And then he knelt in the grass before me so we were eye level. I froze. His next move surprised me the most. Calmly, he said, “Fear is not weakness. It reminds us that we are human—with limitations. We are not gods. But, instead of hiding our fear, what if we faced it? For in facing what makes us afraid, we become stronger.

So, it’s like that, huh?” “Yes, it’s like that.” “Fine. Game on.” Why did I say that out loud? Idiot!

Don’t. You. Dare,” I warned, my voice a quiet threat. Something changed in his expression then. Something . . . intense. “One thing you should know about me, little bird. I. Always. Dare.

He stared at me, eyes gradually narrowing as several emotions warred for dominance on his face. Would he laugh with me? Or would he—Oh, he was offended. Good. My shoulders shook harder.

You again?" I glanced to my left and there was Ryker. I almost laughed at the irony. Pretty soon he’d think I was running into him on purpose. “What’s his name?” I asked, jerking my chin toward his dark bay charger sporting white socks. “Napoleon,” he said, which surprised me. His response almost sounded human. “And don’t get too close to him. He bites.” I rolled my eyes. That was more like him. “Oh, that’s okay. I bite back.” I could have sworn his lips twitched into what appeared to be a grin.

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. — DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, The Negro

Historical periods are often defined by single phrases which seem to capture the mood or the political climate of a nation at a particular point in time. In America today we are dangerously on the verge of entering a period when social problems are ignored and allowed to fester until they emerge at some future time in such a diseased condition that the social order is threatened with a general breakdown. We have been through a period of difficult change, and people are tired. They do not want to be reminded that there are still problems, most grievously that problem which Gunnar Myrdal called "the American dilemma." Whites are retreating, becoming hostile and fearful, blacks are becoming enraged, and liberals are confused and discontented. And the federal government, the principal agency through which we can find a way out of our racial agony, is in the hands of men who lack progressive intention. "Benign neglect," a phrase borrowed from the past, seems to define the present. Neglect of problems that are difficult to solve, avoidance of realities that are unpleasant to confront--Mr. Moynihan's phrase speaks to our society's weaknesses, its capacity for self-delusion and apathy. We have not entirely reached this point yet. There is still time to reverse our direction, to move forward. To fail to seize this opportunity today may make it impossible for us to do so in the future. Perhaps the lack of vision evinced by Mr. Moynihan can shock us into a recognition of how far we must still go to achieve the evasive yet splendid goal of racial justice.

In 1986, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sponsored a law banning the use of tax-free bonds to finance stadiums, exactly the financing being used by the Yankees and the Mets. So how did Steinbrenner and the Mets owners get around that law? How did they manage to benefit from triple tax-free municipal bonds that add to the burdens of federal, state, and city taxpayers? First, the Yankees and the Mets will not pay rent on their new stadiums, which the city will own. If they paid rent, the Moynihan law would prohibit the sale of tax-exempt bonds to finance the stadiums. But since the stadium bonds must be paid for, where will the money come from?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young Kennedy appointee in the Labor Department, spoke for most when he said, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know the world is going to break your heart eventually.” During those four cold, bleak November days, all Americans were Irish.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”1

And I think a person should never be ashamed of their scars. Wear them with pride.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once quipped “If you want to build a great city, create a great university and wait 200 years.”11

The future of the human organism is here phased out by a tumefying mechanosphere and, as Butler wrote, the ‘servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master’. In using machines to adapt our environment to our ends, we instead end up becoming increasingly adapted to the machine. In this sense, the tool—which was once a mere means—transforms ‘into the master’. Günther Anders picked up on this theme beautifully a century later. He wrote that, through mechanisation, we are constructing our own extinction-by-obsolescence. By ceding everything to the machine in the name of convenience, we are wilfully manufacturing a ‘world without us’—in so far as we will eventually be adapted out of the rat race, a casualty of evolutionary parsimony. Where others had spoken of humans becoming parasites of the technological realm, Anders spoke of the technological realm ‘parasitically exploiting’ us. Technology is a ‘skin cancer’ on the planet, he wrote (hours after receiving treatment for the lung tumour that later killed him), a ‘metastasis’ that lives ‘parasitically’ off the biosphere. Indeed, we might classify industrial modernity itself as a mechanical, planet-enclosing brood parasite: just as the Sacculina is a diversion of resources away from crab reproduction, hijacking the crab’s instincts to nurture the next generation of barnacles, so too does industry divert and capture the resources of humanity, utilising our ancient appetites to pollinate and propagate itself by luring us with artificial pleasures, from sugar to screens, while our own fertility collapses.

This, of course, had long been Teilhard de Chardin’s preferred explanation for the Great Silence. Chardin saw sophidetonation as an implosion inward rather than an explosion outward: a form of centralisation like the evolution of the brain, but threading across the planet rather than rebounding within the skull. This was what he called Point Omega, a form of transcendence where intelligence essentially disappears into its own self-created virtual domain, leaving mundane reality behind all together. Never one to miss a religious resonance, Chardin noted that this ‘supreme synthesis’ is a ‘phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death’. In fact, this was the final one of Shklovsky’s ‘internal contradictions’: if reason consists in denying natural inclinations then, of course, it will end up etherealising itself out of existence...

A man with this worldview is committed to a ceaseless process of discernment, a process by which he judges various paths and decides between various possibilities how best to accomplish the holy will of God by bringing his own calm, reasoned judgment to bear on the task or problem at hand. The underlying conviction of this old Catholic worldview is that each day is given to men and women to live in such a way as to give honor and glory to God who St. John tells us is the Logos ("and the Word was God"); that is, the meaning or reason of all things.

Moynihan’s unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.

Moynihan’s literal truth—that family breakdown would stymie black advancement even as racism and discrimination declined—is simply irrefutable today, nearly fifty years after his report.

The bomb was 'born secret,' as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said. The atomic bomb marked a powerful turning point in America's stewardship of national security affairs. After its arrival, Garry Willis argues, 'the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People.' But the first stop was a radical restructuring of the government itself, to account for the development and expansion of a nuclear arsenal requiring special means, staffs, oversight, and a stringent and novel regime of peacetime secrecy. The national security state was born.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.

The legendary New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

cita de Daniel Patrick Moynihan, «todo el mundo tiene derecho a tener su propia opinión, pero no sus propios hechos»,

Like the late United States senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we believe that people have a right to their own opinion but not a right to their own facts.

Perhaps it is just a version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum on human rights: that claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country. You do not hear of such violations in unfree countries. Only a very free society would permit – and even encourage – such endless claims about its own iniquities. Likewise, somebody can only present a liberal arts college in America or a dining experience in Portland as verging on the fascist if the people complaining are as far away from fascism as it is possible to be.

Just because something is everywhere doesn't mean it's less beautiful.