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

— Murray Kempton

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

— Murray Kempton

Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.

— Murray Kempton

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

— Murray Kempton

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say I think that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

— Murray Kempton

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

— Murray Kempton

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

— Murray Kempton