
“There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.”
Source: Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism. It is those who have never lived under tyranny who call me petit bourgeois.
“There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.”
Source: Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays
Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Battle of the Trees
Context: I have been in a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a consistent form.
I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,
I will believe when it is apparent.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns,
A year and a half.
I have been a continuing bridge,
Over three score river mouths.
“Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country.”
"My Correct Views on Everything" (1974)
Context: When I collect my experiences, I notice that fascist is a person who holds one of the following beliefs (by way of example): 1) That people should wash themselves, rather than go dirty; 2) that freedom of the press in America is preferable to the ownership of the whole press by one ruling party; 3) that people should not be jailed for their opinions. both communist and anti-communist - 4), that racial criteria, in favour of either whites or blacks, are inadvisable in admission to Universities; 5 ) that torture is condemnable, no matter who applies it. (Roughly speaking "fascist" was the same as "liberal".) Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country. The refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1968 were sometimes met in Germany by very progressive and absolutely revolutionary leftists with placards saying "fascism will not pass".
Letter to The Times (26 April, 1968), p. 11.
Source: Twitter https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/1207420638748725250, (30 December 2019)
Letter to The Times (3 August 1978), p. 15
1960s–1970s