"How a ragtag band created Wikipedia" http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/37 - TED Talk (July 2005); this has sometimes appeared paraphrased as "The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks."
Context: Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.
“When people ask me if the division between parties of the right and parties of the left, men of the right and men of the left, still makes sense, the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a man of the left.”
Statement of 1931, as quoted by Marcel Gauchet, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1 - Conflicts and Divisions, edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, p. 266 ISBN 9780231084048
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Alain 35
French philosopher 1868–1951Related quotes
“Political distance among political parties of the right and left.”
Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969)
Extreme Britain Part Two: Tommy Robinson Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dRiBRM-BD8, UNION magazine (19 November 2015)
2015
“I've looked right and left and right again and the only party I can safely vote for is UKIP.”
Comedian Frank Carson backs UKIP http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8052721.stm (May 15, 2009)
As quoted in "Did I say This? in The Observer (20 April 2008)
2008
J. C. Ward, Memoirs of a Theoretical Physicist (Optics Journal, Rochester, 2004).
Speech in Newham, London (11 September 1975), quoted in The Times (12 September 1975), p. 1
1970s
Source: PsyberMagick (1995), p. 44
Context: No left wing parties have any respect for liberal economic values; and most centre and right wing parties merely promote a paternalistic stateism. Does it thus fall to the self-reliant students of the ruggedly individualist philosophy of magick to champion a certain measured libertarianism?
Enrico Bombieri, cited in: Leonard F. Koziol (2014), The Myth of Executive Functioning. p. 1
up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)