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Leftists Quotes

Quotes tagged as "leftists" Showing 1-30 of 34
Andrea Dworkin
“Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“It is obvious that [leftists] are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.”
Theodore Kaczynski

Stefan Molyneux
“If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.”
Stefan Molyneux

“The leftist is anti-individualistic... He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs.”
Theodore Kaczynski

Christopher Hitchens
“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?

I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

Stefan Molyneux
“The paralysis of potential is essential to the manufacturing of victims.”
Stefan Molyneux

“Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.”
Theodore Kaczynski

Angelo M. Codevilla
“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.�
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.�
(The Rise of Political Correctness)”
Angelo Codevilla

Angelo M. Codevilla
“The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. (The Rise of Political Correctness)”
Angelo Codevilla

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
“The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.� Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism� as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.”
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Richard Rorty
“If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland--as a county of simulacra--and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list--endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets--might revitalize leftist politics.”
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country

Steven Pinker
“Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.”
Steven Pinker, Rationality

Kristian Williams
“Curiously, the surveillance, harassment, infiltration, arrests, sabotage, slander, disruption, and petty bullshit endured by the left is only rarely matched by the level police action against the right. Even during World War II, when the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany and allied with the Soviet Union, the NYPD still invested more resources in infiltrating the Communist Party than in monitoring fascists. Likewise, though the FBI eventually initiated COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE against the Klan—an effort that lasted seven years and included infiltration, sabotage, snitch-jacketing, electronic surveillance, black-bag jobs, and petty harassment � 98 percent of COINTELPRO files concerned leftist movements.”
Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

Dennis Prager
“According to just about every poll on happiness, people on the Left are generally less happy than conservatives.”
Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

Jean Baudrillard
“All these old ultra-Leftists thwarted (by History), unclear where they are on the Left–Right spectrum, and ending up writing with both hands � from left to right, of course - in the hope of one day painting spaces of freedom for themselves with their toes.”
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

Jean Baudrillard
“The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politcs, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hypochondriacs from the dead body of ideology and morality.”
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“In other words, they were unwilling to tolerate conservative speech, which they were intolerant of conservative speech.”
Mike Adams, Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" on Campus

“Sometimes, i think the left loses people by telling them that they shouldn't be surprised when they find out something horrific has happened. I think it's okay to be surprised at how violent this world is. Be surprised, then asked why you didn't know

(9/15/2020 on Twitter)”
Derecka Purnell

Koenraad Elst
“The RSS was helpless because of the ideological power equation. Socialist secularism was the dominant ideology, while Hindu nationalism counted as politically incorrect. Those who swore by socialist secularism could afford to kick its alleged opponents around at will.
The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-1947, when they informed the British government(a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim league by propagating economic and often secular-sounding arguments for Partition, once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razakar militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that "China's chairman is also India's chairman" and accused India of having started the war with China. But, they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses. Even worse(at least from a Hindu nationalist viewpoint) then the treatment which the Hindu nationalists received, was their own record as policy-makers.”
Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

Dennis Prager
“One upshot of all this is that there is a simple way to produce fewer leftists. Raise children who are grateful in general, and grateful to be an American in particular, or grateful to be the citizen of any decent country, who don't complain much, who learn to handle losing, and who are guided by values, not feelings. In other words, teach them how to be happy adults. That, more than any one other thing will produce fewer leftists, and a better world. Because the happy make the world better and the unhappy make it worse.”
Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

“My parents joined the Communist Party but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the Left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause� of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.”
Nick Cohen, What's Left?

“They are the most disagreeable of people. � Their insincerity? Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant presumption of superiority of these people? Superiority of intellect! Then, when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings but to a level which is even far below the average.”
James C. Humes, The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill

Jordan B. Peterson
“Después de todo, nuestras grandes teorías racionalistas -fascistas, pongamos por caso, o comunistas- han demostrado su inutilidad esencial en el espacio de unas pocas generaciones, a pesar de su naturaleza intelectualmente atractiva.”
Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

David Graeber
“What is presented as the “moderate� Left solution to any social problems—and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now, ruled out tout court—has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism. It’s as if someone had consciously tried to create the least appealing possible political position. It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing—because surely, if they do, it’s not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth. Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger?The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered-down version of the right-wing critique.”
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Raoul Vaneigem
“Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adult’s heart of an unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.”
Raoul Vaneigem

Slavenka Drakulić
“I know them, the American men (and women) of the left. Talking to them always makes me feel like the worst kind of dissident, a right-wing freak (or a Republican, at best), even if I consider myself an honest social democrat. For every mild criticism of life in the system I have been living under for the last forty years they look at me suspiciously, as if I were a CIA agent... But one can hardly blame them. It is not the knowledge about communism they lack - I am pretty sure they know all about it - it's the experience of living under such conditions. So, while I am speaking for 'within' the system itself, they are explaining it to me from without. I do not want to claim that you have to be a hen to lay an egg, only that a certain disagreement between two starting points is normal. But they don't go for that; they need to be right.”
Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed

Slavenka Drakulić
“I know them, the American men (and women) of the left. Talking to them always makes me feel like the worst kind of dissident, a right-wing freak (or a Republican, at best), even if I consider myself an honest social democrat. For every mild criticism of life in the system I have been living under for the last forty years they look at me suspiciously, as if I were a CIA agent... But one can hardly blame them. It is not the knowledge about communism they lack - I am pretty sure they know all about it - it's the experience of living under such conditions. So, while I am speaking from 'within' the system itself, they are explaining it to me from without. I do not want to claim that you have to be a hen to lay an egg, only that a certain disagreement between two starting points is normal. But they don't go for that; they need to be right.”
Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed

Slavenka Drakulić
“Perhaps to them and their peers their ecological consciousness is a bigger sign of prestige than a fur coat. Perhaps they feel on more equal terms with the world. I admit I saw the future in them. But they were aggressive and I didn't like it, in spite of their concern for animals. On the other hand, perhaps they are too young to understand that human beings are an endangered species and that they too have a right to protection - particularly in some parts of the world. I hope they learn this soon.”
Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

“Philo Taylor Farnsworth successfully demonstrated the first television on Sept. 7, 1927.
Since that time, conservatives have consumed countless hours of positive programming� and completely dismissed every second of it.”
Bryan (Nyrhalahotep) Hardbarger

Salman Rushdie
“Christopher came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the right, that his erstwhile comrades on the left were arranging with one another to miss what seemed to him like a pretty obvious point; and so, never one to do things by halves, he made what looked to many people like a U-turn”
Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

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