Quotes about left
page 27

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto photo

“If things do not change, there will be nothing left to change. Either power must pass to the people or everything will perish.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 14.

Sigmund Freud photo

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: 1920s, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Ch. 5, as translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud (1961)

Ken Livingstone photo

“The next election will bring an influx of over 120 new MPs who will be overwhelmingly on the Left.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

The Guardian (23 September 1985)

Louis-ferdinand Céline photo
Uri Avnery photo

“Their common assumption [communists and left-wing poets] is that every one must stand somewhere politically - and especially the poets, who are under suspicion as unpractical people who shirk the responsibility of taking a stand.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Harry Kemp from The Left Heresy in Literature and Life (London: Methuen, 1939)

Cormac McCarthy photo
Noel Coward photo

“If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well.”

Ivar Ekeland (1944) French mathematician

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 6, Pandora's Box, p. 122.

Albrecht Thaer photo

“After his death I did not attend any more lectures, although I paid for them. Schroeder was succeeded by Ernst Gottfried Baldinger, born in Gross Vargula, near Erfurt, 1738; and descended in a direct line, on his mother's side, from Doctor Martin Luther. He established a dispensary for poor patients, and gave medicine gratia, on condition of his being attended by about thirty pupils. Here it was that I first began to display the knowledge I had gained from my friend, the late Doctor Schroeder; and Baldinger, not seeing me attend his lectures, naturally supposing I was lazy and dull of comprehension, exclaimed, with astonishment, "What will become of this boy?" Whereupon, considering myself insulted by the Doctor, I wished to retire; when he embraced me, and said, good-humouredly, "No, no such a clever young fellow never came under my observation." From this time I became his best friend and daily visitor; I passed whole days and weeks in his valuable and extensive library, and almost in the constant society of his amiable, highly gifted, and accomplished wife; his confidence was so great, that he left the entire direction of his dispensary to me, and even entrusted me with the care of his own family when unwell. Having given up all connexion with my former friends, the students, I selected one Leisewitz, the author of "Julius de Tarent." We sympathised in each other's feelings, and became inseparable. His amiable qualities and inoffensive wit drew around us the best society; but, to our great regret, many of them belonged to a new school of freethinkers, whose principles we endeavoured, by the assistance of the pious Madame Baldinger, to eradicate from their minds; and thus it was thnt Providence brought me over again to the firm belief of the truth of our Divine religion.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

William Hazlitt photo

“Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for — they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"The Modern Gradus ad Parnassum," London Weekly Review (17 May 1828), reprinted in New Writings by William Hazlitt (1925), edited by P. P. Howe

Ann Coulter photo

“Most devastating for the left as a cohesive political movement was the collapse of their beloved Soviet Union. For decades the Great Issue uniting various forces on the left, from proclaimed communists to soft anti-communists, was the socialist "ideal." … Apart from global warming — coming in a thousand years to a planet near you! — the left's only remaining cause is abortion. For many Democrats, Roe v. Wade is the essence of politics.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Source: 2002, Slander : Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), p. 252; Liberals' only remaining big issue is abortion because of their beloved sexual revolution. That's their cause: Spreading anarchy and polymorphous perversity. Abortion permits that.

Paul R. Ehrlich photo
Tori Amos photo
John F. Kerry photo
John Danforth photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Ada Leverson photo
Roger Scruton photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Neil Peart photo
Pushyamitra Shunga photo

“Even a very general knowledge of Indian history already shows that any instances of Hindu persecution of Buddhism could never have been more than marginal. After fully seventeen centuries of Buddhism's existence, from the 6 th century BC to the late 12 th century AD, most of it under the rule of Hindu kings, we find Buddhist establishments flourishing all over India. Under king Pushyamitra Shunga, often falsely labelled as a persecutor of Buddhism, important Buddhist centres such as the Sanchi stupa were built. As late as the early 12 th century, the Buddhist monastery Dharmachakrajina Vihara at Sarnath was built under the patronage of queen Kumaradevi, wife of Govindachandra, the Hindu king of Kanauj in whose reign the contentious Rama temple in Ayodhya was built. This may be contrasted with the ruined state of Buddhism in countries like Afghanistan or Uzbekistan after one thousand or even one hundred years of Muslim rule. Indeed, the Muslim chroniclers themselves have described in gleeful detail how they destroyed Buddhism root and branch in the entire Gangetic plain in just a few years after Mohammed Ghori's victory in the second battle of Tarain in 1192. The famous university of Nalanda with its fabulous library burned for weeks. Its inmates were put to the sword except for those who managed to flee. The latter spread the word to other Indian regions where Buddhist monks packed up and left in anticipation of further Muslim conquests. It is apparent that this way, some abandoned Buddhist establishments were taken over by Hindus; but that is an entirely different matter from the forcible occupation or destruction of Buddhist institutions by the foreign invaders.”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, and in: K. Elst The Problem with Secularism, 2007

Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Lal Bahadur Shastri photo

“India will have to hang down her head in shame if even one person is left who is said in any way to be untouchable.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party
Elie Wiesel photo
Ambrose Bierce photo
Thom Yorke photo
Cao Xueqin photo

“All those whom history calls great
Left only empty names for us to venerate.”

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5

Seneca the Younger photo

“What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.”
Quid ergo? non ibo per priorum vestigia? ego vero utar via vetere, sed si propiorem planioremque invenero, hanc muniam. Qui ante nos ista moverunt non domini nostri sed duces sunt. Patet omnibus veritas; nondum est occupata; multum ex illa etiam futuris relictum est.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII

Arthur Waley photo

“A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, Monkey: Folk Novel of China (1942), Ch. 27 (p. 266)

Hillary Clinton photo
Théodore Rousseau photo
Ed Bradley photo
Harry Chapin photo
Hans Frank photo

“I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To Leon Goldensohn, February 12, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Ron Paul photo

“A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

RonPaul2008.com, May 2007 http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/border-security-and-immigration-reform/
2000s, 2006-2009

Prem Rawat photo
Ann Coulter photo

“The only standard journalists respect is: Will this story promote the left-wing agenda?”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2004, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004)

Frank Deford photo
Kage Baker photo

“As Mahoba was for some time the headquarters of the early Muhammadan Governors, we could hardly expect to find that any Hindu buildings had escaped their furious bigotry, or their equally destructive cupidity. When the destruction of a Hindu temple furnished the destroyer with the ready means of building a house for himself on earth, as well as in heaven, it is perhaps wonderful that so many temples should still be standing in different parts of the country. It must be admitted, however, that, in none of the cities which the early Muhammadans occupied permanently, have they left a single temple standing, save this solitary temple at Mahoba, which doubtless owed its preservation solely to its secure position amid the deep waters of the Madan-Sagar. In Delhi, and Mathura, in Banaras and Jonpur, in Narwar and Ajmer, every single temple was destroyed by their bigotry, but thanks to their cupidity, most of the beautiful Hindu pillars were preserved, and many of them, perhaps, on their original positions, to form new colonnades for the masjids and tombs of the conquerors. In Mahoba all the other temples were utterly destroyed and the only Hindu building now standing is part of the palace of Parmal, or Paramarddi Deva, on the hill-fort, which has been converted into a masjid. In 1843, I found an inscription of Paramarddi Deva built upside down in the wall of the fort just outside this masjid. It is dated in S. 1240, or A. D. 1183, only one year before the capture of Mahoba by Prithvi-Raj Chohan of Delhi. In the Dargah of Pir Mubarak Shah, and the adjacent Musalman burial-ground, I counted 310 Hindu pillars of granite. I found a black stone bull lying beside the road, and the argha of a lingam fixed as a water-spout in the terrace of the Dargah. These last must have belonged to a temple of Siva, which was probably built in the reign of Kirtti Varmma, between 1065 and 1085 A. D., as I discovered an inscription of that prince built into the wall of one of the tombs.”

Archaeological Survey of India, Volume I: Four Reports Made During the Years 1862-63-64-65, Varanasi Reprint, 1972, Pp. 440-41. Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1993). Hindu temples: What happened to them. Volume I.

Willa Cather photo
Glenn Beck photo

“…I said yesterday on Fox & Friends, I think the president is a racist, I think he has race issues. Don't know if he hates white people, but there's something going on with the president. Well, I stand by that. And I deem him a racist based on really his own standard of racism, the standard of the left.”

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

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2009-07-29
Beck "stands by" Fox & Friends remarks that "I think the president is a racist"
Media Matters for America
2009-07-29
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907290012
2000s, 2009

W. Edwards Deming photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“We think in America that it is necessary to introduce the people into every department of government as far as they are capable of exercising it; and that this is the only way to ensure a long-continued and honest administration of it's powers. 1. They are not qualified to exercise themselves the EXECUTIVE department: but they are qualified to name the person who shall exercise it. With us therefore they chuse this officer every 4. years. 2. They are not qualified to LEGISLATE. With us therefore they only chuse the legislators. 3. They are not qualified to JUDGE questions of law; but they are very capable of judging questions of fact. In the form of JURIES therefore they determine all matters of fact, leaving to the permanent judges to decide the law resulting from those facts. Butwe all know that permanent judges acquire an esprit de corps; that, being known, they are liable to be tempted by bribery; that they are misled by favor, by relationship, by a spirit of party, by a devotion to the executive or legislative; that it is better to leave a cause to the decision of cross and pile than to that of a judge biased to one side; and that the opinion of twelve honest jurymen gives still a better hope of right than cross and pile does. It is left therefore, to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges; and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to the Abbé Arnoux (19 July 1787) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0275
1780s

William Hazlitt photo
Naomi Klein photo
Mark Satin photo
Barbara Jordan photo
Jon Cruddas photo
Octavio Paz photo

“And to fill all these white pages that are left for me with the same monotonous question: at what hour do the hours end?”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

“McAuley's nominal subject was left-wing incomprehension of the recently published Dr. Zhivago, but the real object of his ire seemed to be liberalism in general, starting with the invention of moveable type, or perhaps the wheel.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'The Great Generation of Australian Poetry'
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Khaled Hosseini photo
Bryan Adams photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
Anthony Burgess photo

“If you reject family - which a mother holds together - as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you?”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)

Basil Rathbone photo

“I don’t know the why of anything, even when I pretend most diligently I do. The truth is the last time I had any idea why or what I was supposed to do I was lying in a shell hole, looking up at the sky. My mind was filled with a Bach keyboard sonata, which was one of the last I’d learned, I forget which one now. I absolutely knew I was about to die and I was completely happy and at peace, in a way I never was before or since, not even with you, in our best moments. It was so easy, you see, a kind of absolute joy and peace, because I knew it was all done and I was all square with life. Nothing left to do but let things take their course. And when I didn’t die, I didn’t know what to do. So I thought, I’ll take my revolver, go out and blow a hole through my head. Only I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew, I just knew you couldn’t do it that way. You couldn’t make it happen, not if you wanted to find peace. So, I thought, then, a sniper can do it for me. But no matter how I tried to let them no sniper ever found me. And all the other times I went out and lay in shell holes in No Man’s Land it wasn’t the same, and I knew I wouldn’t die this time, and of course I never did. I had this mad feeling I’d become some sort of Wandering Jew. And everything for so long afterwards was about dragging this living corpse of myself around, giving it things to do, because here it was, alive. And nothing made any sense and I didn’t even hope it would. I followed paths that were there to be followed, I did what others said to do.”

Basil Rathbone (1892–1967) British actor

Letter https://thegreatbaz.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/fuller-text-of-letter-quoted-in-a-life-divided/

Harriet Harman photo

“I don’t agree with all-male leaderships. Men cannot be left to run things on their own. I think it’s a thoroughly bad thing to have men-only leadership.”

Harriet Harman (1950) British politician

In a newspaper interview http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6736504.ece, 2 August, 2009.

George William Curtis photo

“There are certain great sentiments which simultaneously possess many minds and make what we call the spirit of the age. That spirit at the close of the last century was peculiarly humane. From the great Spanish Cardinal Ximenes, who refused the proposal of the Bishop Las Casas to enslave the Indians; from Milton, who sang, 'But man over man He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free', from John Selden, who said, 'Before all, Liberty', from Algernon Sidney, who died for it, from Morgan Godwyn, a clergyman of the Established Church, and Richard Baxter, the Dissenter, with his great contemporary, George Fox, whose protest has been faithfully maintained by the Quakers; from Southern, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, Savage, Shenstone, Sterne, Warburton, Voltaire, Rosseau, down to Cowper and Clarkson in 1783 — by the mouths of all these and innumerable others Religion, Scepticism, Literature, and Wit had persistently protested against the sin of slavery. As early as 1705 Lord Holt had declared there was no such thing as a slave by the law of England. At the close of the century, four years before our Declaration, Lord Mansfield, though yearning to please the planters, was yet compelled to utter the reluctant 'Amen' to the words of his predecessor. Shall we believe Lord Mansfield, who lived in the time and spoke for it, when he declared that wherever English law extended — and it extended to these colonies — there was no man whatsoever so poor and outcast but had rights sacred as the king's; or shall we believe a judge eighty-four years afterwards, who says that at that time Africans were regarded as people 'who had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

I am not a lawyer, but, for the sake of the liberty of my countrymen, I trust the law of the Supreme Court of the United States is better than its knowledge of history.
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Nigel Cumberland photo

“You might find the idea of listening to your gut feelings odd or even ridiculous. Some people I coach, normally left-brain individuals who use logic and facts all day like engineers or accountants, are not used to following their intuition and feelings. Instead of asking themselves ‘What do I feel?’, they are more comfortable asking ‘What do the facts tell me?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

David McNally photo

“At its heart, this book is about where this new left has come from, and where it might be going.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Preface, p. 11
Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002)

Hannah Arendt photo
Charles Stross photo
Ron Paul photo
John Ensign photo

“He has no credibility left.”

John Ensign (1958) US politician

Urging President Bill Clinton to resign after he admitted an extramarital affair, as quoted in Las Vegas Sun (28 September 1998).

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Edward Heath photo
Dennis Miller photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
George W. Bush photo

“Good morning. This coming week I will be making the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to address a joint session of Congress. We have some business to attend to called the budget of the United States. The federal budget is a document about the size of a big city phone book, and about as hard to read from cover to cover. The blueprint I submit this week contains many numbers, but there is one that probably counts more than any other – $5.6 trillion. That is the surplus the federal government expects to collect over the next 10 years; money left over after we have met our obligations to Social Security, Medicare, health care, education, defense and other priorities. The plan I submit will fund our highest national priorities. Education gets the biggest percentage increase of any department in our federal government. We won't just spend more money on schools and education, we will spend it responsibly. We'll give states more freedom to decide what works. And as we give more to our schools we're going to expect more in return by requiring states and local jurisdictions to test every year. How else can we know whether schools are teaching and children are learning? Social Security and Medicare will get every dollar they need to meet their commitments. And every dollar of Social Security and Medicare tax revenue will be reserved for Social Security and Medicare.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Radio Address to the Nation (February 2001)

Amir Taheri photo
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Gabrielle Roy photo
Truman Capote photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Ayumi Hamasaki photo
Barney Frank photo

“I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Interview with Claudia Dreifus in September and October 1995, published in Times Magazine (4 February 1996)

Salvador Dalí photo
David Mitchell photo

“Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.”

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", p. 155 (Nook Edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

John Byrne photo
Tomislav Sunić photo
Rachel Trachtenburg photo

“I like New York better than Seattle. It's bigger. I was really sad when I left, because I miss my friends, but I call them almost every day, and I have friends here now.”

Rachel Trachtenburg (1993) American musician

On why she prefers New York to Seattle ( The New Yorker https://archive.is/20130630000738/www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/020909ta_talk_mnookin September 9, 2002

Camille Pissarro photo
Robert Solow photo
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero photo

“Discouraging smoking and drinking is a left ideal.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (1960) Former Prime Minister of Spain

3rd September 2005, in a meeting of the PSOE federal committee whilst tabling a motion to increase tax on alcohol and cigarettes to finance health spending.
As President, 2005
Source: Psoe.es http://www.psoe.es/ambito/saladeprensa/docs/index.do?action=View&id=58918 (Spanish)

Johannes Bosboom photo

“In [18]35, I made a study trip about Utrecht and Nijmegen to Dusseldorf, Cologne and [w:Koblenz|Coblentz]], together with Samuel Verveer, who had already left the studio of van Hove. My painting 'View of the Moselle Bridge in Coblentz' – exhibited in the same year here - was bought by Schelfhout and, in addition to the satisfaction it gave me, I was allowed to find a counselor in him from then on; he became and remained my friend since then.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

origineel citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands: In [18]35 maakte ik met gekocht en, behalve de voldoening, die daarin voor mij was gelegen, mocht ik van toen af een raadsman in hem vinden, die mij sinds ook een vriend is geworden en gebleven.
p. 9
1880's, Een en ander betrekkelijk mijn loopbaan als schilder

Nguyen Khanh photo
Björk photo
Edward Schillebeeckx photo
Imelda Marcos photo

“The Philippines is in a strategic position. It is both East and West, right and left, rich and poor. We are neither here nor there.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

At a press conference, on why the Manila Film Festival should be held in Manila, cited in Ang Katipunan (February 1982).

Pete Doherty photo
Nick Cave photo