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

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

We’ve come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The world’s largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The principal objective of American government at every level should be to see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn’t have done greater damage than some of what we see today. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals? — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If you don’t have 30 years to devote to social policy, don’t get involved. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

What is not discussed, will not be advanced. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I’m a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

As the family goes, so go the children. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You’d think that would be pretty obvious. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The status quo is working. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If we get into the mind–set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan