Quotes about left
page 26

Michel Foucault photo
Harlan Ellison photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“We have invited and continue to invite the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to share power with us.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 304–308.
Collected Works

Sarada Devi photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the [Nore] lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond… [The inward-bound ships] all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.”

The Nore to Hope Point
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“2591. If I leave thee a moderate Fortune, as my Father left me, and thou provest wise and virtuous, it will be sufficient. It's none of the least of God's Favours, that Wealth comes not trolling in upon us; for many of us should have been worse, if our Estates had been better.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

These precepts were first collected as advice for Fuller's son John.
Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1751) : Many a Man would have been worse, if his Estate had been better.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Michael Rosen photo

“The competition between chunks of capital is getting fiercer, there is the same old same old desperate need to keep wages down, desperate need to substitute machines for labour (but that costs trillions of investment) and no matter how hard you exploit workers, you still need to sell stuff to them, and if their wages are low, they can't buy the stuff. You can force the poorly paid into borrowing money (credit cards, wonga etc) but there comes a point when that causes a credit crisis: someone somewhere says they want some dosh and a bank somewhere says they haven't got the dosh (Northern Rock, last time). Let's remember, none of this is caused by migrants or left social democrats. This is a crisis entirely born from a system that is locked into competition for markets. So, these fervid rows between squadrons of extremely unpleasant individuals are rows between people who deep down know that they can't control this system of running the making and distribution of the things we need. They are just coming up with fantasies on how to stay in power while the next phase veers from crisis to crisis. It is terrible for millions of people in awful insecure, low paid jobs and/or in insecure, lousy housing, or if they are disabled, or for millions trying to migrate their way out of poverty and despair. We should be alarmed when members of the ruling class start pleading with us to take sides with them against the 'elite': one section of the elite calling for us to oppose the elite.”

Michael Rosen (1946) British children's writer

'Neither Brussels or the City - for the many not the few'. http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/neither-brussels-or-city-for-many-not.html (6 July 2018)

Maynard James Keenan photo

“The process that we go through in recording with Tool is very organic, but at the same time it is very thought out. There is a very left-brain process of dissecting what we're doing and drawing from source material; it's very research oriented and esoteric.”

Maynard James Keenan (1964) musician

Neil Strauss (March 29, 2000) "A brain comes full circle: Rock musician Maynard James Keenan, of the bands Tool and A Perfect Circle", The New York Times, p. B3.

L. Frank Baum photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo

“I say without fear of my figures being successfully challenged that India today is more illiterate than it was before a fifty or hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi, Speech at Chatham House, London, on October 20, 1931. Quoted in Essential Writings of Dharampal by Dharampal, and quoted in S.R. Goel, Hindu Society under siege http://web.archive.org/web/20170202032436/http://bharatvani.org/books/hsus/ch4.htm
1930s

P.G. Wodehouse photo
Kate Bush photo

“Leave the breast
And then the nest
And then regret you ever left.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

Chittaranjan Das photo
Karel Appel photo
Walter A. Shewhart photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Henrik Ibsen photo

“What's to become of the morally sound? Left out in the cold, I suppose. We must heal the sick.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Dr. Rank, Act I
A Doll's House (1879)

Walter Scott photo

“Ah, County Guy, the hour is nigh,
The sun has left the lea.
The orange flower perfumes the bower,
The breeze is on the sea.”

Quentin Durward, Chap. iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Will Cuppy photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo
Julius Malema photo

“It didn’t end there [with genocide]. They passed law after law‚ taking land from our people. Yet investors never left the country. When they passed the Land Act of 1913‚ investors never left the country. Investors came into the country.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

On 4 March 2018, at the launch of the EFF's election registration campaign, Standard Bank arena, Johannesburg. As quoted by Nico Gous in Land in SA was taken through ‘genocide’ and will be returned: Malema https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-03-04-land-in-sa-was-taken-through-genocide-and-will-be-returned-malema/, Sunday Times (4 March 2018)

Margaret Drabble photo
Wonhyo photo
Richard Pipes photo
Ann Coulter photo
Jay Nordlinger photo

“There's a point at which left and right join.”

Jay Nordlinger (1963) American journalist

"Jaywalking" https://web.archive.org/web/20180913133208/https://jaywalking-tapes.nationalreview.com/jaywalking-035-09.12.2018.mp3 (12 September 2018), National Review
2010s

Chuck Jones photo
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Gracie Allen photo
Miho Mosulishvili photo
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo
Howie Rose photo
Aristide Maillol photo
Boyko Borissov photo

“What is the basis of our population at the moment — one million Roma, 700 000 Turks, 2,5 million retirees. This is what GERB is facing. And what about you — a million-and-a-half who ran away?… The human material that we are left with as voters and as a pool for recruiting staff — it is really not that big. It is easy to say: 'we rely on you.”

Boyko Borissov (1959) Bulgarian politician

Speaking to Bulgarian expatriates in Chicago, as quoted in "Mayor of Sofia insinuates that Roma, Turks and retirees are 'bad human material'" in The Telegraph (6 February 2009) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/bulgaria/4531391/Mayor-of-Sofia-brands-Roma-Turks-and-retirees-bad-human-material.html

Charles Evans Hughes photo
T.I. photo
William Lane Craig photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“This morning, you can be on his right hand and his left hand if you serve. It's the only way in.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Drum Major Instinct (1968)

Dmitri Bulykin photo

“Everything is tres-chique in my life now. I've adapted, set up the house, moved the family in. Sometimes my wife visits me. The only thing left is to start playing football… but this hasn't worked out so far”

Dmitri Bulykin (1979) Russian association football player

Дмитрий Булыкин: «Хочу остаться в «Андерлехте» и доказать, что я – хороший футболист» http://www.sports.ru/football/6390016.html

“There are no rules anymore and if you believe that there are, then you’ll be left out.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to Interview Magazine https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/drinks-real-housewife-erika-jayne (2018)

Henry Adams photo
Henry J. Heinz photo

“Ronnie is the best player in the world at the moment, right-handed, left-handed, one-legged, one-armed, whatever you want!”

On Ronnie O'Sullivan They said it: Sporting quotes of the week, 2008-04-02, 2008-04-02, Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/sport/football.html?in_article_id=563414&in_page_id=1779&ct=5,

Jef Raskin photo
Lee Smolin photo
Learned Hand photo
Joseph Merrick photo
Ingrid Newkirk photo

“Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

"Every Week There is More Reason to Feel Empathy for Animals" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-newkirk/every-week-there-is-more_b_216409.html, Huffington Post, 17 July 2009.
2009

Adolf Eichmann photo

“I'd like to say something about this last, about this last point of this terrible, terrible business. I mean Treblinka. I was given orders. I went to see Globocnik in Treblinka. That was the second time. The installations were now in operation, and I had to report to Müller. I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that's what I remembered. Instead, again with the same Sturmbannführer Höfle, I came to a railroad station with a sign saying Treblinka, looking exactly like a German railroad station — anywhere in Germany — a replica, with signboards, etc. There I hung back as far as I could. I didn't push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big… no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed. As I was told, they were gassed with …what's it called? … Potassium cyanide… or cyanic acid. In acid form it's called cyanic acid. I didn't look to see what happened. I reported to Müller and as usual he listened in silence, without a word of comment. Just his facial expression said: "There's nothing I can do about it."”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

I am convinced, Herr Hauptmann, [Eichmann is referring to his interrogator, Avner Less] I know it sounds odd coming from me, but I'm convinced that if it had been up to Müller it wouldn't have happened.
Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 84.

Patrick Buchanan photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Yanni photo
Neville Chamberlain photo
Thomas Frank photo

“Thanks to its chokehold on the nation’s culture, liberalism is thus in power whether its politicians are elected or not; it rules over us even though Republicans have prevailed in six out of the nine presidential elections since 1968; even though Republicans presently control all three branches of government; even though the last of the big-name, forthright liberals of the old school (Humphrey, McGovern, Church, Bayhm, Culver, etc.) either died or went down to defeat in the seventies; and even though no Democratic presidential nominee has called himself a "liberal" since Walter Mondale. Liberalism is beyond politics, a tyrant that dominates our lives in countless ways great and small, and which is virtually incapable of being overthrown.Conservatism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Conservatism does not defend some established order of things: It accuses; its rants; it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions. While liberals use their control of the airwaves, newspapers, and schools to persecute average Americans — to ridicule the pious, flatter the shiftless, and indoctrinate the kids with all sorts of permissive nonsense — the Republicans are the party of the disrespected, the downtrodden, the forgotten. They are always the underdog, always in rebellion against a haughty establishment, always rising up from below.All claims of the right, in other words, advance from victimhood. This is another trick the backlash has picked up from the left. Even though republicans legislate in the interests of society’s most powerful, and even though conservative social critics typically enjoy cushy sinecures at places like the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal, they rarely claim to speak on behalf of the wealthy of the winners in the social Darwinist struggle. Just like the leftists of the early twentieth century, they see themselves in revolt against a genteel tradition, rising up against a bankrupt establishment that will tolerate no backtalk.Conservatism, on the other hand, can never be powerful or successful, and backlashers revel in fantasies of their own marginality and persecution.”

Ibid.(pp. 119-120).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Peggy Noonan photo
Dinesh D'Souza photo
Piet Mondrian photo
Margaret Cho photo
Neil Gaiman photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
Rebecca Solnit photo

“I do not see the marks left by man only as great works, but as love for what surrounds us, as a sequence of small and great actions lived with passion.”

Salvatore Garau (1953) Italian artist

Farnesina, as quoted in Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2016).
Source: https://www.esteri.it/mae/en/sala_stampa/archivionotizie/approfondimenti/2016/10/brasile-aambasciata-e-istituto.html, Farnesina, Ministero degli Esteri, “Brazil – Italian Embassy and Cultural Institute organise a Solo Exhibition by Salvatore Garau in Brasilia", 10/26/2016, www.esteri.it

Rick Warren photo
Park Chung-hee photo

“A year ago on this day around 9:45 a. m. you came downstairs dressed in an orange Korean dress and we left together for the ceremonies. You were leaving the Blue House for the last time in your life. This day a year ago was the longest of my life, the most painful and sad. My mind went blank with grief and despair. I felt as though I had lost everything in the world. All things became a burden and I lost my courage and will. A year has passed since then. And during that year I have cried alone in secret too many times to count.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Diary entry (15 August 1975), as quoted in The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Revised and Updated http://books.google.com/books?id=yJZKpYXh2SAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Two+Koreas:+A+Contemporary+History+revised+updated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X-xvU5TRFPOisQSa34CIBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=already%20into%20the%20last%20week&f=false (2001), by Don Oberdorfer, p. 56.
1970s

“I am confident, however old-fashioned this may sound, that funds left in the hands of the public will come into the Exchequer with interest at the time in the future when we need them.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 28, 1962, page 51.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Silvio Berlusconi photo

“The women of the Right are certainly the most beautiful … the Left has no taste, not even when it comes to women”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

As quoted in "Did I say This? in The Observer (20 April 2008)
2008

Thomas Carlyle photo

“I purpose now, while the impression is more pure and clear within me, to mark down the main things I can recollect of my father. To myself, if I live to after-years, it may be instructive and interesting, as the past grows ever holier the farther we leave it. My mind is calm enough to do it deliberately, and to do it truly. The thought of that pale earnest face which even now lies stiffened into death in that bed at Scotsbrig, with the Infinite all of worlds looking down on it, will certainly impel me. It is good to know how a true spirit will vindicate itself with truth and freedom through what obstructions soever; how the acorn cast carelessly into the wilder-ness will make room for itself and grow to be an oak. This is one of the cases belonging to that class, "the lives of remarkable men," in which it has been said, "paper and ink should least of all be spared." I call a man remarkable who becomes a true workman in this vineyard of the Highest. Be his work that of palace-building and kingdom-founding, or only of delving and ditching, to me it is no matter, or next to none. All human work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. Only the worker thereof, and the spirit that dwelt in him, is significant. I proceed without order, or almost any forethought, anxious only to save what I have left and mark it as it lies in me.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Samuel Johnson photo

“A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Epitaph on Goldsmith
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Laurence Sterne photo

“Now, there is a genuine social justice which proceeds not from the principle of equality, but from the principle: Suum cuique — to each his own. It is true that to deprive the workman of his just wage is not only a sin, but a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. When one hinders social advance by putting barriers in the way of the diligent and the talented, one not only commits a personal injustice, but damages the common good of the whole nation, which always requires a genuine elite of ability and the contribution of extraordinary brainpower in every walk of life. And it would be socially unjust if a few individuals or certain groups had so much material wealth that, in consequence of this concentration of property and income, other classes had to live not only in povery, but in misery. Whoever lives in real abundance has a Christian duty to assist those living in wrechedness. Before we proceed, however, let us affirm that the notion of misery is different from that of poverty. Péguy has already drawn the distinction between pauvreté and misère. To live in misery means to suffer genuine physical privation: to know cold and hunger, to have no proper dwelling, to be dressed in rags, to be unable to secure medical attention. The poor, by contrast, have the necessities of life, but scarcely any more. They can borrow books, no doubt, but cannot buy them; they can hear music on the radio, but cannot afford a ticket to a concert; they cannot indulge in little extras of food and drink, but should, by self-discipline, be able to save a little. The poor have, therefore, the normal material preconditions for happiness — unless plagued by acquisitiveness or even envy, which has become a political force in the same measure as people have lost their faith. The fact that there are happy poor (alongside unhappy rich people) is beside the point. Demagogues know how to stir up terrible and murderous unrest even among the happy poor, as has been demonstrated clearly by the history of the left from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Hitler.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pgs 53-54
The Timeless Christian (1969)

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“It’s clear that the Democratic Party believes a radical left candidate is their best chance to win the White House this year. Hillary’s just a little bit too sane. Under the bus with her.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

May 31, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30149_The_First_Notes_of_Hillarys_Swan_Song&only

Stanley Baldwin photo

“The mystery, the romance, the coincidence of real life far transcends the mystery and the romance and the coincidence of fiction. I would like at the beginning of my remarks to remind hon. Members of something that has always struck me as one of the strangest and most romantic coincidences that have entered into our political life. Far away in time, in the dawn of history, the greatest race of the many races then emerging from prehistoric mists was the great Aryan race. When that race left the country which it occupied in the western part of Central Asia, one great branch moved west, and in the course of their wanderings they founded the cities of Athens and Sparta; they founded Rome; they made Europe, and in the veins of the principal nations of Europe flows the blood of their Aryan forefathers. The speech of the Aryans which they brought with them has spread through out Europe. It has spread to America. It has spread to the Dominions beyond the seas. At the same time, one branch went south, and they crossed the Himalayas. They went into the Punjab and they spread through India, and, as an historic fact, ages ago, there stood side by side in their ancestral land the ancestors of the English people and the ancestors of the Rajputs and of the Brahmins. And now, after aeons have passed, the children of the remotest generations from that ancestry have been brought together by the inscrutable decree of Providence to set themselves to solve the most difficult, the most complicated political problem that has ever been set to any people of the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1929/nov/07/india in the House of Commons (7 November 1929).
1929

Arundhati Roy photo

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Pauli Murray photo

“This society is not hospitable to persons of color, women or left-handed people.”

Pauli Murray (1910–1985) American writer, activist and lawyer

[Boodman, Sandra, 28 February 1977, A master of many trades, Washington Post, Washington DC]

Taliesin photo
Richard Holbrooke photo

“Dayton shook the leadership elite of post-Cold War Europe. The Europeans were grateful to the United States for the leading the effort that finally ended the war in Bosnia, but some European officials were embarassed that American involvement had been necessary. Jacque Poos's 1991 assertion that Europe's "hour had dawned" lay in history's dustbin, alongside James Baker's view that we had no dog in that fight. "One cannot call it an American peace", French Foreign Minister de Charette told the press, "even if President Clinton and the Americans have tried to pull the blanket over to their side. The fact is that the Americans looked at this affair in ex-Yugoslavia from a great distance for nearly four years and basically blocked the progression of things." But de Charette also acknowledged that "Europe as such was not present, and this, it is true, was a failure of the European Union." Prime Minister Alain Juppé, after praising the Dayton agreement, could not resist adding, "Of course, it resembles like a twin the European plan we presented eighteen months ago" - when he was Foreign Minister. Agence France-Presse reported that many European diplomats were "left smarting" at Dayton. In an article clearly inspired by someone at the French Foreign Ministry, Le Figaro said that "Richard Holbrooke, the American mediator, did not leave his European collegues with good memories from the air base at Dayton." They quoted an unnamed Franch diplomat as saying, "He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin." President Chirac's national security assistant, Jean-David Levitte, called to apologize for this comment, saying it did not represent the views of his boss. I replied that such minidramas were inevitable given the pressures and frustrations we faced at Dayton and were inconsequential considering that the war was over.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 318

Ilana Mercer photo
Gregor Strasser photo

“We must take from the right nationalism without capitalism and from the left socialism without internationalism.”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

As quoted in "Wars, Revolutions, Dictatorships", by Stanislav Andreski - History - (1992)

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Henry Adams photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo

“The Government's policies of controlling local authority spending, cutting National Health spending and promoting private medicine and care for the elderly are a return to the workhouse. The only difference is that it is a capitalist workhouse rather than a discreet workhouse stuck away in the hills outside the town…Care for the elderly is an important issue. It cannot be left to volunteers, charities or to people going out with collecting boxes to see that old people are looked after properly. The issue is central to our demands for a caring society. That means an end to the cuts and an end to the policy of attacking those authorities that try to care for the elderly. Instead, there should be support for and recognition of those demands. Elderly people deserve a little more than pats on the head from Conservative Members. They deserve more than the platitudinous nonsense talked about handing the meals on wheels service over to the WRVS or any other volunteer who cares to run it. Instead, there should be a recognition that those who have worked all their lives to create and provide the wealth that the rest of us enjoy deserve some dignity in retirement. They do not deserve poverty, or to be ignored in their retirement, having to live worrying whether to put on the gas fire, or boil the kettle for a cup of tea, or whether they can afford a television licence or a trip out. They should not have to wonder whether the home help who has looked after them so long will be able to continue. The issue is crucial. The motion says clearly that care for the elderly comes before the promotion of policies that merely increase the wealth of those who are already the wealthiest in our society.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1984/feb/22/care-of-the-elderly in the House of Commons (22 February 1984).
1980s

Camille Paglia photo
Ehud Barak photo

“This government needs to be brought down before it brings all of us down, there are no serious leaders left in the world who believe the Israeli government.”

Ehud Barak (1942) Israeli politician and prime minister

During an interview to Channel 10, (May 20, 2016). http://www.timesofisrael.com/livni-pm-picking-liberman-over-yaalon-is-crisis-of-ethics/