Weekend Words: Moderate
"Extremism in the pursuit of the Presidency is an unpardonable vice. Moderation in the affairs of the nation is the highest virtue."
As BBC News reports, the backlash against moderator Matt Lauer for his handling of Wednesday night’s presidential candidate forum on national security has been swift and unforgiving: “There’s an old adage in sport that the best referees are the ones that go largely unseen. Judging by US media reaction, NBC moderator Matt Lauer stomped around Wednesday’s Trump-Clinton forum with a foghorn for a whistle. It certainly takes some performance to find yourself in as many headlines as Donald Trump.”
Extremism in the pursuit of the Presidency is an unpardonable vice. Moderation in the affairs of the nation is the highest virtue.
—Lyndon Johnson, speech (1964)
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
—Thomas Mann
Nothing in the world is more haughty than a man of moderate capacity when once raised to power.
—Baron Wessenberg
The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.
—John Arbuthnot Fisher, lecture notes
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
—Thomas Paine
It is better to excel in any single art than to arrive only at mediocrity in several, so moderate skill in several is to be preferred where one cannot attain to perfection in any.
—Pliny The Younger
Moderation is never applauded for its own sake. A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.
—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.
—Baruch Spinoza
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
—Truman Capote
Everything in moderation including moderation.
—Terence
Minds of moderate caliber ordinarily condemn everything which is beyond their range.
—Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
—G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
