“Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.”

— Doris Lessing

"Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism" http://www.dorislessing.org/unexamined.html, in Our Country, Our Culture - The Politics of Political Correctness (1994), Partisan Review Press, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Philips

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always use…" by Doris Lessing?

Doris Lessing 94

British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … 1919–2013

Related quotes

“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

“When I used to speak of the lunatic fringe, I didn’t know I was going to be head of it.”

Oscar Levant book The Memoirs of an Amnesiac

The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

“Among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it — the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. VII : The War of American and the Unready.

“It (objection to a machine that could think) was the hook used by the rabble rousers, whose monopoly of moral interpretation might be challenged.”

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 18.

“…the lunatic fringe group called Neturei Karta, whose total world membership is about 10…”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

September 25, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31360_Reuters_Hearts_Neturei_Karta&only

“In every new expression of a fundamental Idea there will always be the substitutes, the imitations, dangling from it, as the soiled fringe from a good garment.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

A Testament (1957)

“The progressive movement is the lunatic fringe of the left. It is the home of everything that you despise. It is the home of income tax. It is the home of prohibition. It is the home of the Fed.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2010

“Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher.”

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) English historian

" The Influence Of Women On The Progress Of Knowledge http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/u-rel/buckle.html". Lecture given at the Royal Institution 19 March 1858. In: The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (1872)

“Moral training which does not encourage critical examination of popular ideas of what is right and good, does not tend to make men better, but only of one mind.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 183

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Doris Lessing 94

Related quotes

Related topics