There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community 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
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.
As cited in Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America by Gary LaFree 1998 : Moynihan is quoted in an article that appeared in Mickey Kaus, The Work Ethic State, The New Republic (1986) July 7:22-33, 23; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation: The Godkin Lectures (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).
Books by and about Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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