Quotes about left
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“I am a conservative. I intend to give the American people a clear choice. I welcome a fight between our philosophy and the liberal left-wing dogma which now threatens to engulf every man, woman, and child in the United States. I am in this race because I believe the American people have been pushed around long enough and that they, like you and I, are fed up with the continuing trend toward a socialist state which now subjects the individual to the dictates of an all-powerful central government.”

George Wallace (1919–1998) 45th Governor of Alabama

Speech http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1951-/speech-by-george-c-wallace-the-civil-rights-movement-fraud-sham-and-hoax-1964-.php (4 July 1964) 1960s

People, Fight

“Economists of the modern school will no doubt protest that I have said nothing of the use of budget deficits or surpluses for the control of the economy in general. I doubt if such techniques would ever be appropriate in Hong Kong's exposed economic position; and I think they are certainly not appropriate at present, when in strict orthodoxy they would suggest the need to plan for a very substantial surplus "to take the heat out of the economy". Although we have in fact run substantial surpluses in recent years we have not done so with deflationary effect because we have not removed them from the economy but have left them inside the Colony's banking system to continue to work for the economy. $500 million or 55% of reserves are so held at present.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 26, 1964, page 47.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

School, Thinking

“I've been pretty wary of street sweepers since, though it is true that since we left the European Exchange Rate Mechanism some sweepers are really quite dashing to glance at.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

“It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,
And left thee all her lovely hues.”

William Henry Davies (1871–1940) British poet

The Kingfisher

Love, Birth

“The "Democrats" have learned from the unlamented KGB, whose primary weapon of desinformatsiya, or disinformation, was a million agents whose job was to ruin the reputation of every key opponent of worldwide Communism by making up vicious rumors and peddling them via a plethora of front organizations. The left have done their best to trash my reputation because I have dared to question the climate scare with which they had hoped to bully the West into shutting itself down without a shot being fired. Just look at my CreepyMedia page. I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of artful lies told over and over again by a host of paid trolls and useful idiots.”

Christopher Monckton (1952) British public speaker and hereditary peer

7 steps that'll land Obama in jail http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/7-steps-thatll-land-obama-in-jail/ WorldNetDaily, December 31, 2013.

Hope, Art, Communication, Question

“For ten years I never left my books;
I went up … and won unmerited praise.
My high place I do not much prize;
The joy of my parents will first make me proud.”

Bai Juyi (772–846) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"After Passing the Examination" (A.D. 800)
Arthur Waley's translations

Books, Parent, Joy

“Simon, always a fool for simplicity, accepted. Punch took an envelope out of his pocket and scribbled on the back of it. He said, 'This has a simple arithmetical proof but no rational explanation of the paradox.' He gave it to Simon. Simon read it, looked at Punch with raised eyebrows, hunched his shoulders, shook his head sadly, and got up and left the room without a word.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: The Curve of the Snowflake (1956), p. 72.

Fools, Reading

“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Frequently attributed to Bevan as his own words, and sometimes sourced to remarks to NHS patients in 1948 ( example http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/9106880/Read-this-and-prepare-to-fight-for-your-NHS.html), but believed to have been misattributed. The statement was not written down until the television play about Bevan, 'Food for Ravens' by Trevor Griffiths. Griffiths himself attributes it to Bevan: "I have no written source for it, but old Bevanites in the coalfields were saying something like it during the strikes of the 80s and often quoting Nye as the source." ( The truth of Nye Bevan’s words on the NHS https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/02/the-truth-of-nye-bevans-words-on-the-nhs) In the script, a dying Bevan is asked by a young boy if he will be remembered for creating the NHS: Bevan: Maybe, if it lasts. Boy: (looking at press cuttings) Says here it will last forever. Bevan: No such thing as forever, boy. It will last only as long as there's folk with faith left to fight for it. Food for Ravens https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-8-summer-1998/food-for-ravens/ by Marc Karlin. Misattributed

Faith, Fight

“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 162)

Truth, Religion, Way, Idea

“You can eat beef on a weekly basis and become a genius intuitive if your energy is in present time. You can consume only organic food while running thirty-five miles a day and "om-ing" until dawn, but if your spirit is raging about your history and is saturated in regrets and unfinished business, you won't be able to intuit your left hand from your right…”

Caroline Myss (1952) author from the United States

Distractions, Distractions, by Caroline Myss, August 19, 2010 http://www.healyourlife.com/author-caroline-myss/2010/08/lifeshelp/success-and-abundance/distractions-distractions&utm_id=HYLFB

Food, History, Business, Rage

“Ralph waved the conch.
"Shut up! Wait! Listen!"
He went on in the silence, borne on in his triumph.
"There’s another thing. We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire."
"A fire! Make a fire!"
At once half the boys were on their feet. Jack clamored among them, the conch forgotten.
"Come on! Follow me!"
The space under the palm trees was full of noise and movement. Ralph was on his feet too, shouting for quiet, but no one heard him. All at once the crowd swayed toward the island and was gone— following Jack. Even the tiny children went and did their best among the leaves and broken branches. Ralph was left, holding the conch, with no one but Piggy.”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 2: Fire on the Mountain

Children, Mountain, Boy, Tree

“Quoyle, you got any maritime connections?' 'My grandfather was a sealer.' 'Jesus. You always come out at me out of left field.”

Annie Proulx book The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 30

“That,' I said, 'would be a blessing. There are so many things I'd like to forget I hardly know what would be left standing, if I ever got started.”

Helen Garner book Cosmo Cosmolino

Page 4.
Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)

Forgetting

“I think if you left grownups to do what they really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone.”

Orson Scott Card book Lovelock

Lovelock (1994)

Life, Lie, World, Thinking

“When Reagan and Thatcher came to power, “authoritarian populism” was a term academics used to describe their politics. Now it’s a phenomenon, growing rapidly, cutting across old definitions of left and right, goes the argument. But it’s not so simple and the phenomenon is not new. The term “authoritarian populist” is a construct that, if we are not careful, could blind us to the real roots of centrism’s sudden crisis – and to the answers.”

Paul Mason (journalist) (1960) British journalist

How do we fight the loudmouth politics of authoritarian populism? (21 November 2016)

“Lookin' so innocent,
I might believe you if I didn't know.
Could'a loved you all my life,
If you hadn't left me waiting in the cold.
And you got your share of secrets,
And I'm tired of being last to know.
And now you're asking me to listen
'Cause it's worked each time before.”

Taylor Swift (1989) American singer-songwriter

You're Not Sorry.
Song lyrics, Fearless (2008)

Love, Life, Secret, Time

“Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Love, Feeling, Lying

“The liberty of the press ought to be left where the Constitution has placed it, without any power in Congress to abridge it; that if they abridge it, they will destroy it; and that whenever that falls, all our liberties must fall with it.”

George Nicholas (1754–1799) American lawyer

Letter to a friend in Virginia (1798); cited in The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes (1960)

“Lolla-Wossiky is left like a White man then. Cut off from the land. Ground crunching underfoot. Branches snagging. Roots tripping. Animals running away.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 4.

Animals

“Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I had decided upon, there is always left a trace of envy for those who have triumphed in the melancholy struggle for literary supremacy.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

The Age for Love

Envy

“Anyone who isn’t strong is left in a corner, no one asks for their autograph, they are abandoned in the cold shadows. Those who win, however, become icons.”

Bode Miller (1977) American alpine ski racer

Interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, 16 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385083/

Strong

“"He's been left high and dry" (when someone has missed a top rope maneuver)”

Jim Ross (1952) American professional wrestling commentator, professional wrestling referee, and restaurateur

Commentary Quotes

“Well I'm shameless when it comes to loving you.
I'd do anything you want me to
I'd do anything at all.
And I'm standing here for all the world to see
There ain't that much left of me
That has very far to fall.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Shameless.
Song lyrics, Storm Front (1989)

Love, World

““How does one conquer fear, Don B.?”
“One takes a frog and sews it to one’s shoe,” he said.
“The left or the right?”
Don B. gave me a pitying look.
“Well, you’d look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn’t you?" he said. “One frog on each shoe.””

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge”, pp. 7–8.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Fear, Shoe

“The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.”

Jesse Helms (1921–2008) American politician

WRAL-TV commentary, 1963 cited in Media Downplay Bigotry of Jesse Helms http://fair.org/press-release/media-downplay-bigotry-of-jesse-helms/ 1960s

Men

“When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!”

Rudyard Kipling book Barrack-Room Ballads

Young British Soldier, Stanza 13.
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, 1896)

Women

“Why did they label me a college dropout? The connotation is, he left to go have fun. Not that I served honorably in the Navy, went to college on the GI Bill, trained to be a pro wrestler, and took a job when the opportunity came up. Isn't that what college is for, to prepare you to earn a living? The positive is, I still have three years of eligibility left — if Harvard wants me for its football team.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

On the "stupid, lazy" media reports on his lack of a college education.
Harvard interview (February 2004)

Football, Training

“Imagine a limitless expanse of water: above and below, before and behind, right and left, everywhere there is water. In that water is placed a jar filled with water. There is water inside the jar and water outside, but the jar is still there. The "I" is the jar.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 659

Imagination, Water

“There’s a theory that if you have an interesting childhood then you have enough material to last a lifetime. But that implies that art is always autobiographical when reinvention and imagination are the most important elements. But it doesn’t hurt to have a mad family! Of course I didn’t notice until I’d escaped – when I left home as a teenager on a diplomatic scholarship – how odd my family were.”

Carole Morin British writer

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse (2013)

Family, Art, Home, Imagination

“The good thing is that all the symbolic elements are gone, and that which really matters – the core – is left.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen (1953) former Prime Minister of Denmark and NATO secretary general

On the Lisbon Treaty, Jyllands-Posten, 25 June 2007

“And this time I forget to slip into your slumber
The light is on the left side of your head
And I'm standing in your doorway
And I'm mumbling and I can't remember the last thing that ran through my head”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Ballerina
Song lyrics, Astral Weeks (1969)

Light, Time, Forgetting

“One morn I awakened, a new sun was shining,
The sky was a kingdom, all covered in blood.
The moon and the stars, where the troops that lay conquered,
Like food left to wither, poor spirital food.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, Tender Prey (1988), New Morning

Food, Star, Sun

“They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.
"Drunk," the cop said.
The other one turned me around into the light. "He don't smell bad. That cut on his head didn't come from a fall either."
"Mugged?"
"Maybe."
I didn't give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now.
Now was a time when I wasn't anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it's torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.”

Mickey Spillane book The Girl Hunters

The Girl Hunters (1962)

Cars, Jerk, Way, Feeling

“He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Ernest Hemingway" (1977), p. 240
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Art, Intelligence, Thinking

“If you really want to know, I'd rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing's done now, of course, and I can’t alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left.”

J. M. G. Le Clézio book La fièvre

La fièvre (1965)

Life

“It was in vain. I brought my hardest right angle into violent collision with the Stranger, pressing on him with a force sufficient to have destroyed any ordinary Circle: but I could feel him slowly and unarrestably slipping from my contact; no edging to the right nor to the left, but moving somehow out of the world, and vanishing to nothing. Soon there was a blank. But still I heard the Intruder's voice.

SPHERE. Why will you refuse to listen to reason? I had hoped to find in you — as being a man of sense and an accomplished mathematician — a fit apostle for the Gospel of the Three Dimensions, which I am allowed to preach once only in a thousand years: but now I know not how to convince you. Stay, I have it. Deeds, and not words, shall proclaim the truth.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 17. How the Sphere, Having in Vain Tried Words, Resorted to Deeds

Truth, World, Hope, Feeling

“How nicely you put it! We may rant against fortune and the world, but we are left at the end with the stark proposition: “These are the things which are.””

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 17 (p. 108)

World

“Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few – perhaps not half a dozen in all – the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Bernard Shaw (1931) p. 191.

Women

“My greatest regret has been that I could not share the joy of growing up with my children. When they were growing up, I was working from morning to night. When I left, they were asleep, when I came back, they were asleep. In many ways, I envy Jaya who spends more time with them. Of course, these days, thanks to the condition put by the various associations, there is just one shift and I do get back home early. But now the kids are at the boarding. And I miss them. In certain respects, we have probably not been able to give them a very normal upbringing. Specially after I entered politics and the security problem came up. Going to school with six-seven guards holding machine guns is not really the wisest of ideas for a growing child. And I'm sure it must have affected them adversely. Not being able to go to friends' houses without checking out details, without informing the security. Not being able to invite their friends home for various security reasons. Metal detectors, checking out proper-ties and their friends. Even my friends and people who visited me were checked out. They were embarrassed but it couldn't be helped.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Children, People, School, Way

“Did [Franz von] Papen really see nothing in National Socialism but its nationalism, could he have overlooked its revolutionary ‘dynamism,’ its restless and boundless revolutionary energy? That is exactly what happened… the monarchist elements imagine that they would easily put those attractive young men in their place. But there was another motive, the fear of the masses and of a revolution of the Left, the fear that the National Socialist masses might go over to the extreme Left.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 9

Men, Fear, Imagination, Motivation

“I speculate that the genesis of the chicken-joke lies in some situation such as the one illustrated above, but over time the original context of the joke was lost, which left the chicken sadly decontextualized.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Explaining jokes http://www.insaneabode.com/roboterotica/jokesexplained/whydidthechicken.html

Time

“I always wanted to leave home. I never knew they were going to stop me from coming back. Maybe, if I knew, I never would have left. It is kind of painful to be away from everything that you've ever know. Nobody will know the pain of exile until you are in exile. No matter where you go, there are times when people show you kindness and love, and there are times when they make you know that you are with them but not of them. That's when it hurts.”

Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) South African singer and civil rights activist

As quoted in

Love, Pain, People, Home

“I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to brand performance. … Something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting that the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 83-84.

War, Beauty, Art, Intelligence

“I ran and grabbed the arm of the soldier who was lighting the fire. I tore the fuse away from him and, furious, threw myself into my machine to break down the contraption surrounding it. But I was too late. Hardly had I stepped inside when I found myself propelled into the clouds.
I was terrified, but my mind was not too upset for me to remember all that happened at that moment. I can tell you, then, that the fire burned out a bank of rockets (which had been linked together in rows of six with a hook at the edge of each set of half-dozen). Another stage ignited, then another, so that the danger in the gunpowder was left behind as it burned. When the material was used up, the scaffolding was gone. I was thinking that all I had left to do was ram my head against some mountain when I felt (without moving in the slightest) that I was still going up. My machine separated from me, and I saw it fall back to earth.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Mountain, Thinking, Light

“With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Three, "Alt. Everything"

Youth, Past

“If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

On the conditions of the "Schrödinger's cat" thought-experiment, as presented in The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics (1935), translated by John D. Trimmer http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html

Cats, Parting, Dead

“In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”

Simon Schama (1945) British historian

Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) p. 320 (1991)

World, Dead

“The fear was all he had left, but even that was something—he was afraid, so he must be alive! There was darkness, but there was Simon, too! There were not one and the same. Not yet. Not quite…”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 13, “Between Worlds” (p. 199).

Fear

“How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.”

Yukio Mishima book Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses (1969), as translated by Michael Gallagher (1973).

Youth, Age, Way, Feeling

“[about how people in the 90's used "awesome" wrongly]
Webster's dictionary defines awesome as "anything that leaves you in awe and wonder." Like winning the lottery—twice. That's awesome. Getting a call from the IRS saying you've been audited and they owe you $50,000—that would be awesome. Ladies, you wake up tomorrow morning and the newspaper reads, "Scientists have discovered a way for men to experience childbirth." That would be awesome. Getting invited to the Playboy Mansion—on trampoline night, that would be awesome. And I started thinking, ladies and gentlemen, what would be awesome for Bill Engvall? What would leave me in awe and wonder? And it would have to be, if I left this stage tonight and I went back to my hotel room, and Shania Twain met me at my door, wearing nothing but a fur coat, holding a note from my wife that said, "Have a good time!"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

THAT would be AWESOME! It ain't gonna happen—but that would be awesome.
Now That's Awesome (2000)

Men, People, Way, Thinking

“Of course I deserve it,” I said, stroking Mojo. “That’s the simplest thing about dealing with me, apparently. I always deserve the worst! The worst disloyalty, the worst betrayal, the worst abandonment! Lestat the scoundrel. Well, they have left this scoundrel entirely on his own.”

Anne Rice The Tale of the Body Thief

The Tale of the Body Thief (1992)

Betrayal

“By the time of its disappearance at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, it was no longer plausible to argue that the Soviet Union offered a clear alternative to the ‘right-wing extremism’ of fascism. In fact, it was no longer clear what ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ might be taken to mean in terms of the major revolutions of the twentieth century.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 6

Time

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay book Critical and Historical Essays

"Essay on Ludwig von Ranke's 'History of the Popes', in "Critical and Historical Essays", iii, (London; Longman, 7th Edn. 1952), 100-1.
Attributed

Life, Hostility, Children, Lie

“The bourgeois, even the Nationalist Press, began to take fright and talk of Bolshevism and Hitler himself boasted: ‘In our movement the two extremes come together: the Communists from the Left and the officers and students from the Right. These two have always been the most active elements, and it was the greatest crime that they used to oppose each other in street fights.’… Our party has already succeeded in uniting these two utter extremes within the ranks of our storm troops. They will form the core of the great German liberation movement, in which all without distinction will stand together when the day comes to say: The Nation arises, the storm is breaking!”

Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) German journalist and historian

Source: Der Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944), p. 122

Fight

“It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 15 (p. 83)

“Whatever Hitler may ultimately prove to be, we know what Hitlerism has come to mean, It means naked, ruthless force reduced to an exact science and worked with scientific precision. In its effect it becomes almost irresistible.
Hitlerism will never be defeated by counter-Hitlerism. It can only breed superior Hitlerism raised to nth degree. What is going on before our eyes is the demonstration of the futility of violence as also of Hitlerism.
What will Hitler do with his victory? Can he digest so much power? Personally he will go as empty-handed as his not very remote predecessor Alexander. For the Germans he will have left not the pleasure of owning a mighty empire but the burden of sustaining its crushing weight. For they will not be able to hold all the conquered nations in perpetual subjection. And I doubt if the Germans of future generations will entertain unadulterated pride in the deeds for which Hitlerism will be deemed responsible. They will honour Herr Hitler as genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more. But I should hope that the Germans of the future will have learnt the art of discrimination even about their heroes. Anyway I think it will be allowed that all the blood that has been spilled by Hitler has added not a millionth part of an inch to the world’s moral stature.”

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

Harijan (22 June 1940), after Nazi victories resulting in the occupation of France.
1940s

Pleasure, World, Hope, Art

“You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.”

E.L. Doctorow book Billy Bathgate

Billy Bathgate (1989), Ch. 16

Love, Truth, Sex, Nature

“We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Transcript: Thom Hartmann talks to Chris Hedges about how liberals are a useless lot. 07 Dec '09. http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2010/02/transcript-thom-hartmann-talks-chris-hedges-about-how-liberals-are-useless-lot-07-dec-0

People, Question

“Mossadeq made the crowds laugh and cry. He confirmed their prejudices and superstitions and flattered their vanities - they were, in most cases, all they had left. They loved him, but did he love them? No one could know for sure.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Love, Cry

“We were marching down the street, and we were at the head of the troops. We went on marching, and the troops went off to the left.”

Geoffrey Burbidge (1925–2010) British astronomer

Of his leadership of supporters of the Steady State theory of cosmology Wall Street Journal obituary 30 January 2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703389004575033382092023468.html?mod=googlenews_wsj We are all made from stardust

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men, War, Faith, Way

“The Grand Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

In Chomsky on Anarchism, 2005.
Quotes 2000s, 2005

People, Way, Understanding, Personality

“One is left with the uneasy feeling that even if supersymmetry is actually false, as a feature of nature, and that accordingly no supersymmetry partners are ever found by the LHC or by any later more powerful accelerator, then the conclusion that some supersymmetry proponents might come to would not be that supersymmetry is false for the actual particles of nature, but merely that the level of supersymmetry breaking must be greater even that the level reached at that moment, and that a new even more powerful machine would be required to observe it!”

Roger Penrose book Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe

Source: Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016), Ch. 1, Mathematical Elegance as a Driving Force, pp. 102–103

Feeling, Nature, Falseness

“In one variant, "Allah will not wrong a believer in respect of any good deed - he gives to him on account it in this world and he rewards him for it in the Next world. The unbeliever enjoys all the fruits of any good deeds he does for Allah Almighty in this world so that when he passes to the Next world, he had no good deeds left for which to be repaid."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 428
Sunni Hadith

World

“I feel better than I have in years—no leg problems at all. But if I'm to get three more home runs, I'm afraid I'll have to get them right-handed. I don't know what's the matter. I've lost my confidence from that side. I've always been a better right-handed hitter than left, but it wasn't until recently that I really got into a left-handed slump. I just don't seem able to pull the trigger, hitting left-handed. I have no excuse for it. It's not my legs or anything. The ball just gets up to me before I know it.”

Mickey Mantle (1931–1995) Professional baseball player

Speaking after Game 2 of the 1960 World Series, regarding his worsening left-handed batting woes—in particular, as regarded his chances of breaking Babe Ruth's World Series HR mark of 15; as quoted in "Mantle Figures He Can Break Babe's Series HR Mark if the Bucs Throw Southpaws" http://www.mediafire.com/view/6cqvl5q8trgqtg8/%20.png by Associated Press, in The Atlanta Constitution (Friday, October 7, 1960), p. 49.

Feeling, Home, Confidence, Problem

“All, wherein I have part,
All that was loss or gain, Slips from the clasping heart,
Breaks from the grasping brain. Lo, what is left? I am bare
As a new-born soul, — I am naught:
My deeds are dust in air,
My words are ghosts of thought.
I ride through the night alone,
Detached from the life that seemed,
And the best I have felt or known
Is less than the least I dreamed.”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

The Guests of Night (1871), st. 3 - 4, in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1907), p. 314.

Life, Dreams, Soul, Loss

“Whether the French were better colonists than the British is an academic question, but at least such Frenchmen as were planting in Malaya (Pierre Boulle, for instance, and Henri Fauconnier) were kept sane by their own culture and some of them (those two, anyway) produced memorable novels based on their Malayan experiences. The British were mostly philistines, and they left behind a heritage of philistinism. Kampung culture is dying, and a metropolitan culture of art galleries and orchestras seems unlikely to arise. What there is, and flourishing too, is a materialist consumerism that is threatened from the north by the communists and from the west by the militant Islam of the ayatollahs. Mr Butcher’s book deals with a race of people who may well be surveyed in terms of anthropological generalities. There was no room for the brilliant or the eccentric. British Malaya was created by courageous and suffering mediocrities. The building of Singapore in 1819 was a rather different affair.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

"White Men Sweating" - review of The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia, by John G. Butcher.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People, Books, Art, Courage

“Animals for the most part just need to be left alone.”

Wayne Pacelle (1965) American activist

"Wayne Pacelle works for the winged, finned and furry," 2008

Animals, Parting

“Motherhood and all the sentimentality that goes with Mother's Day was not congenial to the Greek mind. They were a remarkably unsentimental people; they had no particular reverence for children, nor did they regard them as a special and privileged portion of society. It would not have occurred to them to erect a vast temple to Mickey Mouse. They left that for us.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

The Noble Greeks.

Children, People

“In the midst of possible world war, of wholesale destruction, I find my only question this: are there enough people now who believe? Is there time enough left for the wise to act? It is a contest between ignorance and death, or wisdom and life. My faith in humanity stands firm.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

This I Believe (1951)

Life, Death, Wisdom, War

“We might have a chance now to rebuild it all with what we have left. We might have learned that we can exist only as a part of nature, not apart from nature.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Rebellers (1963), p. 155

Nature, Learning, Chance, Parting

“Should the enemy make any considerable detachments from New York, a larger covering party may be necessary for the State of Connecticut, as I should have more apprehensions of their committing depredations, if they detach, than if they do not; for then they will have nothing left but to play the small game.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Game

“I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 41.

Lying, Tree, Grass

“There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.”

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

As quoted in Socialist Organiser, the newspaper of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory (March 1979)

“Fredo Lampe. Am Rande Der Nacht. For me, name and title evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear your gaze. You are convinced that, behind them, somebody whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for years, or else that there is no longer anybody there. Only a lamp, left burning in the empty room.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

P 87
The Search Warrant (2000)

Tear, Light

“Now it's a war on women; tomorrow it's going to be a war on left-handed Irishmen or something like that.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

Naples, Florida fundraiser, , quoted in * 2012-10-19
Bashir: Ryan compares ‘war on women’ to ‘war on left-handed Irishmen’
MSNBC
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/martin-bashir/49482269#49482269
2012-11-07

Women, War

“I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain. My wife and I suffered more than I can express, but to make poems merely out of the agony would have been self-pitying and dishonest. My son had been my greatest joy. His birth had left me awe-struck and humble before life. He turned me from a son into a father — and allowed me to understand my own father clearly for the first time. If I mourned him, I also wanted to preserve the joyful mystery of his existence. The sorrow could not be adequately appreciated without also expressing the joy and wonder.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Life, Pain, Birth, Understanding

“You have seen the impetuosity of the Hindus and their indifference to death, whenever any calamity befalls them, as at this moment. If, therefore, you refuse to grant peace in the hope of obtaining plunder, tribute, elephants and prisoners, then there is no alternative for us but to mount the horse of stern determination, destroy our property, take out the eyes of our elephants, cast our children into the fire, and rush on each other with sword and spear, so that all that will be left to you, is stones and dirt, dead bodies, and scattered bones.”

Jayapala (964–1001) Ruler of the Kabal Shabi

Cited by Utbi, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

Death, Children, Peace, Hope

“A light is gone from yonder sky,
A star has left its sphere;
The beautiful--and do they die
In yon bright world as here?
Will that star leave a lonely place,
A darkness on the night?—
No; few will miss its lovely face,
And none think heaven less bright!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Lost Star from The Literary Souvenir, 1828
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love, World, Beauty, Star

“More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously: President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas; Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy, she called 'Oh, no!'; the motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

On the JFK Assassination (1963)

“He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.”

Henry David Thoreau book A Plea for Captain John Brown

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

Way

“Muhammad Kasim, ascertaining that large offerings were made to the idol, and wishing to add to his resources by those means, left it uninjured, but in order to show his horror of Indian superstition, he attached a piece of cow's flesh to its neck, by which he was able to gratify his avarice and malignity at the same time.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Multan (Punjab). Zakariya bin Muhammad (al-Kazwini): Ãsaru’l-Bilad in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. I : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 470.
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Time

“When people are suffering, they usually hurt the people closest to them, because those are the only ones left around.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 11 “Self-Distraction is Self-Destruction” (p. 325)

People, Suffering, Hurt

“Historical studies of the sciences tend to adopt one of two rather divergent points of view. One of these typically looks at historical developments in a discipline from the inside. It is apt to take for granted many of the presuppositions that are currently popular among members of the discipline and hence tends to view the past in terms of gradual progress toward a better present. The second point of view does not adopt its framework of issues and presuppositions from the field that is the object of study but tends nowadays to rely heavily on questions and concepts derived from studies in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. A history written from the insider's point of view always conveys a strong sense of being "our" history. That is not the case with the second type of history, whose tone is apt to be less celebratory and more critical.
In the case of the older sciences, histories of the second type have for many years been the province of specialists in the history, philosophy, or sociology of science. This is not, or perhaps not yet, the case for psychology, whose history has to a large extent been left to psychologists to pursue. Accordingly, insiders' histories have continued to have a prominence they have long lost in the older sciences. Nevertheless, much recent work in the history of psychology has broken with this tradition.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. vii; Preface.

History, Question, Sense, Study

“My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton book Vril

Source: The Coming Race (1870), Chapter 1. This is the origin of the phrase "pursuit of the almighty dollar". Washington Irving coined the expression almighty dollar itself.

Travel, Time

“On Earth they've forgotten how to make everything except money. But what good is it, if there's nothing worthwhile left to buy?”

James P. Hogan (1941–2010) British writer

Outward Bound (1999)

Money

“When I left Nashville I went to Texas because that's where I came from, and because I was playing in Texas a lot in different places. And I saw hippies and rednecks drinking beer together and smoking dope together and having a good time together and I knew it was possible to get all groups of people together – long hair, short hair, no hair – and music would bring them together.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

Willie Nelson: 'If We Made Marijuana Legal, We'd Save a Whole Lotta Money and Lives', Michael, Hann, May 17, 2012, May 20, 2012, The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Ltd. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/17/30-minutes-with-willie-nelson,

People, Music, Drink, Beer

“What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.”

Peter Ackroyd book The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Page 7.
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983)

People, Home

“Not til the late nineteenth century was the doctrine of the subordination of time and change seriously challenged. Bergson and William James, animated by different motives and proceeding by different methods, then installed change at the very heart of things. Bergson took his stand on the primacy of life and consciousness, which are notoriously in a state of flux. He assimilated that which is completely real in the natural world to them, conceiving the static as that which life leaves behind as a deposit as it moves on. From this point of view he criticized mechanistic and teleological theories on the ground that both are guilty of the same error, although from opposite points. Fixed laws which govern change and fixed ends toward which changes tend are both the products of a backward look, one that ignores the forward movement of life. They apply only to that which life has produced and has then left behind in its ongoing vital creative course, a course whose behavior and outcome are unpredictable both mechanistically and from the standpoint of ends.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Life, World, Law, Behavior

“No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Of Fortune
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Chance

“So from there on I made all their science fiction films, and the more I did of these films the more I liked it because the studio left me alone. No one at that time was an expert at making sf films so I claimed to be one. I wasn't, of course, but the studio didn't know that so they never argued with me, no matter what I did. In most of my sf films I tried to create an atmosphere because I think if you shoot an imaginative film--a film in which you ask an audience to believe things that are bizarre--you have to make them believe it. You can't do this with the story or actors alone, you have to create a kind of atmosphere while shooting it in which the audience's credibility will be suspended to the point where they don't say to themselves: "That's impossible!"”

Jack Arnold (director)

Jack Arnold in The Horror People http://eric.b.olsen.tripod.com/arnold.html (1976)

Imagination, Thinking, Science, Time

“Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

“The Forest is Crying”, p. 62
The Ivory and the Horn (1996)

Wisdom, Learning

“The left in Hollywood are quick to flaunt their political allegiances; this provides them the ability to both grow in number and maintain their level of influence. Meanwhile, the right in Hollywood, for the most part, hide in the shadows and cower. When they do make their views known, conservatives are minimized and their careers are attacked as irrelevant, or as “not A-list enough.””

Robert Davi (1953) American actor and jazz singer

Davi: To Influence Hollywood, Conservatives Need to Grow a Pair http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/03/13/davi-influence-hollywood-conservatives-need-grow-pair/ (March 13, 2017)

Parting