Quotes about left
page 30

Ted Nelson photo
Libba Bray photo
Rick Santorum photo

“When you look and see what the left is trying to do in America today, progressives are trying to shutter faith, privatize it, push it out of the public square, oppress people of faith, strip their charitable deductions away from them, trying to weaken them, churches — trying to say that anybody who believes in the value of Judeo-Christian principles, as we saw in the Ninth Circuit just this week, that if you believe that — this is what the court said — that if believe that, if believe what's taught in Genesis, if you believe what's practiced Biblically and in generations since, then you are irrational. The only possible reason you could believe this, according to the Ninth Circuit, is that you are a bigot, and that you are a hater. Because you can't possibly think differently, you can't possibly think differently unless you are a bigot or a hater, cause there's no rational reason not to see marriage as the way the Ninth Circuit does. They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what's left is the. What's left is a government that gives you rights. What's left are no unalienable rights. What's left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you'll do and when you'll do it. What's left, in France, became the guillotine.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're a long way from that, but if we do, and follow the path of President Obama, and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

referring to Ninth Circuit ruling unconstitutional , which banned same-sex marriage

Neil Armstrong photo
Camille Paglia photo
John Constable photo
Charlotte Brontë photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Anton Chekhov photo

“A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Love (1886)

John Gray photo

“Hobbes’s understanding of the dangers of anarchy resonates powerfully today. Liberal thinkers still see the unchecked power of the state as the chief danger to human freedom. Hobbes knew better: freedom’s worst enemy is anarchy, which is at its most destructive when it is a battleground of rival faiths. The sectarian death squads roaming Baghdad show that fundamentalism is itself a type of anarchy in which each prophet claims divine authority to rule. In well-governed societies, the power of faith is curbed. The state and the churches temper the claims of revelation and enforce peace. Where this kind is impossible, tyranny is better than being ruled by warring prophets. Hobbes is a more reliable guide to the present than the liberal thinkers who followed. Yet his view of human beings was too simple, and overly rationalistic. Assuming that humans dread violent death more than anything, he left out the most intractable sources of conflict. It is not always because human beings act irrationally that they fail to achieve peace. Sometimes it is because they do not want peace. They may want the victory of the One True Faith – whether a traditional religion or a secular successor such as communism, democracy or universal human rights. Or – like the young people who joined far-Left terrorist groups in the 1970s, another generation of which is now joining Islamist networks – they may find in war a purpose that is lacking in peace. Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 262-3)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

Arthur Koestler photo
A. James Gregor photo
Henry John Stephen Smith photo
Emanuel Lasker photo

“Put two players against each other who both have perfect technique, who both avoid weaknesses, and what is left?—a sorry caricature of chess.”

Emanuel Lasker (1868–1941) German World Chess Champion and grandmaster, contract bridge player, mathematician, and philosopher

Others
Source: [Andrew Soltis, Soltis, Andy, The Great Chess Tournaments and Their Stories, 133, New York 1927 • The End of Chess?, 1975, Chilton Book Company, 0-8019-6138-6]

William Ewart Gladstone photo

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

1870s

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Brook Taylor photo
Edyta Górniak photo
Charles James Fox photo
Zeev Sternhell photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“Not all monotheisms are exactly the same, at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion, they're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of wahhabism and salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally, it's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman – in the Arabian Peninsula – three times through an archangel, and that the resulted material, which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old…and The New Testament, is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right – as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read, had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says "no, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams – this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now – "Behead those who cartoon Islam". Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you why you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left. This is really serious. … Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred, is also the main caller for censorship.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM&feature=youtu.be&t=16m36s
"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate", 15/11/2006.
2000s, 2006

John Banville photo
Elizabeth Bishop photo

“The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Poem: The Armadillo http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bishop.armadillo.html

David Brin photo
Marcus Garvey photo
Woody Allen photo
Muhammad Iqbál photo
Aurangzeb photo
Bob Rae photo

“The premise of neo-conservatives is that markets left to their own devices will produce the best possible result, and that political interference is not required. This defies the human reality that people are not commodities, and simply refuse to behave as if they were.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Two, The First Question: Self Interest and Prosperity, p. 39-40

Ilana Mercer photo
Herman Kahn photo
Ken Robinson photo
Iain Banks photo
Silvio Berlusconi photo
John Dryden photo

“Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore;
Long labours both by sea and land he bore.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Aeneis, Book I, lines 1–4.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

Camille Paglia photo

“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 38

Koenraad Elst photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Bill Clinton photo
Jordan Peterson photo
Cory Doctorow photo
Amitabh Bachchan photo
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon photo

“Whilst playing cards,
Elizabeth: How are you getting on? You don't look very happy.
Lord Salisbury: Oh, Ma'am, I've been left with a horrible queen.
Elizabeth: I don't think that's a very good of way of putting it, do you?”

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (1900–2002) Queen consort of King George VI, mother of Queen Elizabeth II

As quoted by Lord Home of the Hirsel in The Queen Mother Remembered (2002), BBC Books

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon photo

“It was said by a very learned Judge, Lord Macclesfield, towards the beginning of this century that the most effectual way of removing land marks would be by innovating on the rules of evidence; and so I say. I have been in this profession more than forty years, and have practised both in Courts of law and equity; and if it had fallen to my lot to form a system of jurisprudence, whether or not I should have thought it advisable to establish two different Courts with different jurisdictions, and governed by different rules, it is not necessary to say. But, influenced as I am by certain prejudices that have become inveterate with those who comply with the systems they found established, I find that in these Courts proceeding by different rules a certain combined system of jurisprudence has been framed most beneficial to the people of this country, and which I hope I may be indulged in supposing has never yet been equalled in any other country on earth. Our Courts of law only consider legal rights: our Courts of equity have other rules, by which they sometimes supersede those legal rules, and in so doing they act most beneficially for the subject. We all know that, if the Courts of law were to take into their consideration all the jurisdiction belonging to Courts of equity, many bad consequences would ensue. To mention only the single instance of legacies being left to women who may have married inadvertently: if a Court of law could entertain an action for a legacy, the husband would recover it, and the wife might be left destitute: but if it be necessary in such a case to go into equity, that Court will not suffer the husband alone to reap the fruits of the legacy given to the wife; for one of its rules is that he who asks equity must do equity, and in such a case they will compel the husband to make a provision for the wife before they will suffer him to get the money. I exemplify the propriety of keeping the jurisdictions and rules of the different Courts distinct by one out of a multitude of cases that might be adduced.... One of the rules of a Court of equity is that they cannot decree against the oath of the party himself on the evidence of one witness alone without other circumstances: but when the point is doubtful, they send it to be tried at law, directing that the answer of the party shall be read on the trial; so they may order that a party shall not set up a legal term on the trial, or that the plaintiff himself shall be examined; and when the issue comes from a Court of equity with any of these directions the Courts of law comply with the terms on which it is so directed to be tried. By these means the ends of justice are attained, without making any of the stubborn rules of law stoop to what is supposed to be the substantial justice of each particular case; and it is wiser so to act than to leave it to the Judges of the law to relax from those certain and established rules by which they are sworn to decide.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Bauerman v. Eadenius (1798), 7 T. R. 667.

George Hendrik Breitner photo

“Hartenstraat - the air is strong light - houses, illuminated from the top, left - flags translucent (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek)”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

version in original Dutch / werk-notities van Breitner, in het Nederlands:
Hartenstraat - 1 uur 's middags - de vlaggen werpen schaduw op de huizen
Hartenstraat - de lucht is sterk licht - huizen, links van boven verlicht - vlaggen doorschijnend
two working-notes, (1890-1895) from his sketch-books; as cited in George Hendrik Breitner in Amsterdam, J. F. Heijbroek, Erik Schmitz; uitgeverij THOTH, Bussum, 2014, p. 38
1890 - 1900

Abd al-Karim Qasim photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Bill Clinton photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Larry Wall photo

“It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[7448@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

Leonid Brezhnev photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Ben Jonson photo

“The voice so sweet, the words so fair,
As some soft chime had stroked the air;
And, though the sound were parted thence,
Still left an echo in the sense.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

LXXXIV, Eupheme, part 4, lines 37-40
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Underwoods

Diogenes Laërtius photo

“Apollodorus says, "If any one were to take away from the books of Chrysippus all the passages which he quotes from other authors, his paper would be left empty."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Chrysippus, 3.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 7: The Stoics

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo
John McCain photo

“Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Address at Virginia Beach (2000), as quoted in The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000228/aponline165646_000.htm (28 February 2000).
2000s

Charles Stross photo
Jesse Ventura photo
O. Henry photo
Mahmud of Ghazni photo
Orson Scott Card photo

“Intellectuals still argue whether Amerika is a fascist country. This concern is typical of the Amerikan left’s flight from reality. … This is actually a manifestation of the authoritarian process seeping into its own psyche.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 120

“It is my considered opinion that the so called Kashmir problem, we have been facing, since 1947 has never been viewed in a historical perspective. That is why it has defied solution so far, and its end is not in sight in the near future. Politicians at the helm of affairs during this nearly half a century have been living from hand to mouth and are waiting for Pakistan to face them with a fait accompli. Once againg they are out to hand over Kashmir and its people to be butchers who have devastated this fair land and destroyed its rich eulture. … It is therefore high time that we renounce this ritual and have a look at the problem in a historical perspective. I should like to warn that histories of Kashmir written by Kashmiri Hindus in modern times are worse than useless for this purpose. I have read almost all of them, only to be left wondering at the piteous state to which the Hindu mind in Kashmir has been reduced. I am not taking these histories into account except for bits and pieces which fall into the broad pattern. … What distinguishes the Hindu rulers of Kashmir from Hindu rulers elsewhere is that they continued to recruit in their army Turks from Central Asia without realizing that the Turks had become Islamicized and as such were no longer mere wage earners. One of Kashmir's Hindu rulers Harsha (1089-1101 CE) was persuaded by his Muslim favourites to plunder temple properties and melt down icons made of precious metal. Apologists of Islam have been highlighting this isolated incident in order to cover up the iconoclastic record of Islam not only in Kashmir but also in the rest of Bharatvarsha. At the same time they conceal the fact that Kashmir passed under the heel of Islam not as a result of the labours of its missionaries but due to a coup staged by an Islamicised army. … Small wonder that balance of farces in Kashmir should have continued to tilt in favour of Islamic imperialism till the last Hindu has been hounded out of his ancestral homeland. Small wonder that the hoodlums strut around not only in the valley but in the capital city of Delhi with airs of injured innocence. Small wonder that the Marxist-Muslim combine of scribes who dominate the media blame Jagmohan for arranging an overnight and enmasse exodus of the Hindus from the valley. (They cannot forgive Jagmohan for bringing back Kashmir to India at a time when the combine was hoping that Pakistan would face India with an accomplished fact.) Small wonder that what Arun Shourie has aptly described as the "Formula Factory"”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

the Nayars, the Puris, the Kotharis, the Dhars, the Haksars, the Tarkundes - should be busy devising ways for handing over the Kashmir Hindus to their age-old oppressors.
Kashmir: The Problem is Muslim Extremism by Sita Ram Goel https://web.archive.org/web/20080220033606/http://www.kashmir-information.com/Miscellaneous/Goel1.html

Terence V. Powderly photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“It seems to me almost impossible to work in Paris [he just left Paris] unless one has some place of retreat where one can revive oneself and get back one's tranquility and poise. Without that one would get hopelessly brutalized.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in a letter of Vincent tot brother Theo, from Arles, 21 Febr. 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 463), p. 28
1880s, 1888

Julian of Norwich photo
Hugh Plat photo
Timothy Leary photo

“I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

On being brought back to life, during the period in which he considered putting his body into cryonic suspension, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said About Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 130

William Ewart Gladstone photo
Arsène Wenger photo

“He deliberately left them out of the code. After all, he rationalized, this is only version 1.0.”

Rick Cook (1944) American writer

Wizard's Bane (1989)

Stevie Nicks photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Karel Appel photo

“The experience of the moment is what's important, and somehow the image, the 'thing' is left over.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

Neil Halstead photo

“Nothing left to lose
Nothing left to fight”

Neil Halstead (1970) British musician

Star Roving, ' (2017).

Jay Nordlinger photo

“[T]he nutcase Left and the nutcase Right are alike in virtually every particular. They should get a room somewhere -- far from here.”

Jay Nordlinger (1963) American journalist

Twitter post https://twitter.com/jaynordlinger/status/1037178490376863744 (4 September 2018)
2010s

Thomas Carlyle photo
Leighton W. Smith, Jr. photo
Steve Blank photo
Rajiv Gandhi photo
Ken Ham photo
Gustav Radbruch photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Johann Hari photo
Eric Hobsbawm photo
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne photo
Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo

“Give me that palette.... those two woodcocks.... turn this one's head to the left.... give me back my palette.... I can't paint that beak.... Quick, some paint.... change the position of those woodcocks…”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

quote from a letter written by Félix Fénéon, published in 'Le Bulletin des artistes' 15th December 1919
this quote is expressing Renoir's last painter-remark, 30 November 1919, three days before he died.
after 1900

Wilhelm II, German Emperor photo

“I haven't had a wink of sleep since I left Wilhelmshohe. I'm gradually cracking up. The troops continue to retreat. I have lost all confidence in them.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Georg Alexander von Müller's diary entry (9 September 1918), quoted in Georg Alexander von Müller, The Kaiser and His Court (London: Macdonald, 1961), p. 343
1910s

Rita Verdonk photo

“I am not left winged, I am not right winged. I am straight forward.”

Rita Verdonk (1955) Dutch politician

Slogan used on Rita Verdonk's weblog http://www.ritaverdonk.net/ retrieved 25 November 2007.