Tao Te Ching
Max Lerner
(Maxwell Alan)
1902 – 1992 CE
Journalist, professor, humanist, and controversial cultural commentator; Lerner supported Roosevelt’s New deal, fought against racial discrimination, and gained a high place on Nixon’s hate list. He mainly supported progressive causes but went along with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and backed Ronald Reagan. Untied to unthinking political dogma, he was considered a controversial liberal during the 50’s and 60’s but more conservative during the 80’s. A close friend of Elizabeth Taylor, he worked on antiwar efforts, taught at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Wellesley, Brandeis, and wrote for the New York Post, the New Republic, The Atlantic, Saturday Review, and many other publications. He applied his dedication to personal responsibility in a struggle with lymphatic cancer which he won and described in a book, Wrestling with the Angel.
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Unlisted Sources
Actions and Passions, 1945
Acttions and Passions, 1949
St. Louis Post, 1938
The Postponed Generation (1949)
The Prince and the Discourses
Quotes by Max Lerner (15 quotes)
“What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is packaged peace of mind. where you buy a pill and buy peace with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.”
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“We live today in the shadow of a Florentine... Niccoló Machiavelli who wrote a grammar of power, not only for the 16th century, but for all the ages that have followed… he came close to setting down the imperative way which men govern and are governed in political communities, whatever the epoch and whatever the governmental structure.”
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“Either men will learn to live like brothers or they will die like beasts.”
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“In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.”
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“A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.”
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“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.”
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“When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.”
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“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.”
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“The press is the most class-conscious segment of big business, since its stock in trade consists of the legends and folklore of capitalism.”
from St. Louis Post, 1938
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“Men have always found it easy to be governed. What is hard for them is to govern themselves.”
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“If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.”
from Actions and Passions, 1945
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“Just as men cannot escape taking on collective responsibility for peace, neither can they escape taking on collective responsibility for economic plenty.”
from Acttions and Passions, 1949
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“Somehow life doesn't always pay off for those who are most insistent.”
from The Postponed Generation (1949)
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“Very few who talk of The Prince have ever read more than a few sentences in it. But fewer still have read the work of Machiavelli which is the saner, the more rounded, the more comprehensive work, The Discourses... The Prince is great because of its intensity, The Discourses are great because of their variety; if The Prince is great because it is polemical, The Discourses are great because they have balance; The Discourses are great because they give us the philosophy of organic unity and the conditions under which alone a culture can survive.
”
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“It is the essence of a symbol that its outlines should be shadowy. What has first been sifted through the intellect is unlikely to ensnare the imagination.”
from The Prince and the Discourses
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