Quotes about left
page 39

Mahatma Gandhi photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo
Jordan Peterson photo
Sherman Alexie photo

“I knew — because of my race, and my class, and rural geography … all these forces that crush all sorts of American kids, crush their hopes and dreams — I knew I had no chance unless I left and went to a better school.”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

On Alexie’s realization that the school on his reservation offered few educational opportunities in “Sherman Alexie Says He's Been 'Indian Du Jour' For A 'Very Long Day'” http://www.npr.org/2017/06/20/533653471/sherman-alexie-says-hes-been-indian-du-jour-for-a-very-long-day in NPR (2017 Jun 20)

William Quan Judge photo
William Quan Judge photo
William Quan Judge photo
Charles Webster Leadbeater photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
William T. Sherman photo

“At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, and Jacksonville, the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority, and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

He cannot be subjected to conscription, or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe. Domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics, will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom, and securing their rights as citizens of the United States.
1860s, 1865, Special Field Order No. 15 (January 1865)

Enoch Powell photo

“The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

On the BBC Radio 4 series Politics in the Seventies (10 June 1973), quoted in The Times (11 June 1973), p. 3
1970s

Alice A. Bailey photo
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez photo
Edward Heath photo
Clement Attlee photo
Edmund Burke photo
Pete Buttigieg photo

“If anything I think my story might help illustrate why categories aren’t as important as we think. I’m a church-going, gay, millennial, Red State mayor. I’m also a left-handed Maltese American. I also spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my partner’s father. So am I supposed to be a Republican or a Democrat?”

Pete Buttigieg (1982) American politician

5 January 2017
Pete Buttigieg: meet the Indiana mayor Barack Obama says could be the future of the Democratic Party
The Telegraph
David Lawler
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/31/pete-buttigieg-meet-indiana-mayor-barack-obama-says-could-future/
2017

Jesse Jackson photo
James Eastland photo

“Today, however, a trend away from traditional standards of propriety begins to be in evidence. Our Court has been indoctrinated and brainwashed by left-wing pressure groups. The Court is out of step with the American people. We see Justices of the Supreme Court banqueted and honored by left-wing Communist-front organizations militantly interested in legislation on which the Supreme Court must pass.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

Congressional Record https://books.google.fr/books?id=WhPOxPiWV2YC&q=%22indoctrinated+and+brainwashed+by+left-wing+pressure+groups.%22&dq=%22indoctrinated+and+brainwashed+by+left-wing+pressure+groups.%22&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjiodS__tjkAhWLnhQKHSqcBdoQ6AEIcjAJ, 1956
1950s

Saddam Hussein photo

“I despised Saddam Hussein, because he attacked Iran when my hostages were being held. It was President Reagan who established diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein after I left office.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Jimmy Carter (10 September 2007), interview with Democracy Now!, http://www.cartercenter.org/peace/human_rights/defenders/news/democ_now0910.html.

Dana Loesch photo

“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America, and I’m freedom’s safest place.”

Dana Loesch (1978) American conservative political commentator

April, 2017 in season 2 episode 2 of the NRATV series Freedom's Safest Place and June, 2017 excerpted as a video advertisement for the NRA ([Dana, Loesch, The Violence of Lies, NRATV, Freedom's Safest Place, April 2017, May 20, 2019, https://www.nratv.com/episodes/freedoms-safest-place-season-2-episode-2-the-violence-of-lies]; [N.R.A. Ad Condemning Protests Against Trump Raises Partisan Anger, Jonah, Engel Bromwich, June 29, 2017, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/us/nra-ad-trump-protests.html]; [Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A., Mike, Spies, April 17, 2019, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/secrecy-self-dealing-and-greed-at-the-nra]; [NRA advert calling on Americans to 'fight lies' called 'an open call to violence', Emily, Shugerman, June 29, 2017, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nra-advert-video-watch-guns-trump-fight-lies-violence-fist-truth-a7815231.html]; [NRA video declares war on liberals, critics say, William, Cummings, USA Today, June 29, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/06/30/controversial-nra-video/441506001/]; Live-Streaming the Apocalypse With NRATV, Parker, James, June 2018, The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/nratv-live-streaming-the-apocalypse/559139/,; [N.R.A. Ad Condemning Protests Against Trump Raises Partisan Anger, Bromwich, Jonah Engel, June 29, 2017, The New York Times, May 20, 2019, en-US, 0362-4331, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/us/nra-ad-trump-protests.html]; [The NRA recruitment video that is even upsetting gun owners, Peter, Holley, June 29, 2017, May 20, 2019, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/06/29/the-nra-recruitment-video-that-is-even-upsetting-gun-owners/]; [A Chilling National Rifle Association Ad Gaining Traction Online Appears to Be 'An Open Call to Violence', Business Insider, May 20, 2019, Natasha, Bertrand, June 29, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/national-rifle-association-ad-call-to-violence-2017-6]; [The NRA just released a violent, terrifying ad, Matthew, Rozsa, June 29, 2017, May 24, 2019, Salon, https://www.salon.com/2017/06/29/the-nra-just-released-a-violent-terrifying-ad/]; [How the N.R.A. Manipulates Gun Owners and the Media, Michael, Luo, w:Michael Luo, August 11, 2017, May 23, 2019, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-nra-manipulates-gun-owners-and-the-media]; [The NRA’s New Scare Tactics, Laura, Reston, October 3, 2017, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/145001/nra-new-scare-tactic-gun-lobby-remaking-itself-arm-alt-right])

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Poul Anderson photo
Simone Weil photo

“The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.”

… It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.
Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 142 (1972 edition)

Jacob Rees-Mogg photo
Stephen King photo
Vasyl Slipak photo

“Ukraine this year celebrated 25 years of independence, but it was real independence only after the Maidan, when a real state started to form. Here we have an example of a person who left his career to fight. New heroes of the new Ukraine are being born.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

Artyom Skoropadsky, a spokesman for Right Sector. Wassyl Slipak, Who Left Paris Opera for Ukraine War, Dies at 41 // The New York Times. - 2016. - June 30. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/europe/wassyl-slipak-who-left-paris-opera-for-ukraine-war-dies-at-41.html?_r=0

Vince Cable photo

“Liberal democracy itself is under threat notably in the USA, in eastern Europe and perhaps here. Authoritarians and extremists of both right and left are on the march.”

Vince Cable (1943) British Liberal Democrat politician

Vince Cable could stand down as Lib Dem leader next year https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45438907, BBC News, 7 September 2018
2018

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax photo
Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Leanne Wood photo
Theresa May photo

“The UK should have left the EU by now and I sincerely regret the fact that I have not yet been able to persuade Parliament to approve a deal.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Brexit: UK and EU agree delay to 31 October https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47889404 BBC News (11 April 2019)
2010s, On Brexit

Walther Funk photo
Paul von Hindenburg photo

“I need them for the manoeuvring of my left wing in the next war.”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

Recommending the annexation of the Baltic Provinces at the Crown Council at Kreuznach (18 December 1917), quoted in John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945 (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 511, n. 2
Chief of the German General Staff

Martin Buber photo

“Frankie Boyle: So, those are our teams. No wonder Simon Amstell left.”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Never Mind The Buzzcocks Series 23 Episode 11

Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Imran Khan photo
Samuel T. Cohen photo

“As you can well imagine, any nuclear bombing study that neglected to target Moscow would be laughed out of the room. (That is, no study at that time; 10 or 15 years later senior policy officials were debating how good an idea this might be. If you wiped out the political leadership of the Soviet Union in the process, who would you deal with in arranging for a truce and who would be left to run the country after the war?) Consequently, two of RAND’s brightest mathematicians were assigned the task of determining, with the help of computers, in great detail, precisely what would happen to the city were a bomb of so many megatons dropped on it. It was truly a daunting task and called for devising a mathematical model unimaginably complex; one that would deal with the exact population distribution, the precise location of various industries and government agencies, the vulnerability of all the important structures to the bomb’s effects, etc., etc. However, these two guys were up to the task and toiled in the vineyards for some months, finally coming up with the results. Naturally, they were horrendous.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

Harold Mitchell, a medical doctor, an expert on human vulnerability to the H-bomb’s effects, told me when the study first began: “Why are they wasting their time going through all this shit? You know goddamned well that a bomb this big is going to blow the fucking city into the next county. What more do you have to know?” I had to agree with him.
F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed photo
Zakir Hussain (politician) photo
Chandra Shekhar photo
H. D. Deve Gowda photo
Rajiv Gandhi photo
Gangubai Hangal photo

“Throat surgery left her with a masculine voice, but the doyenne of the Kirana gharana turned it into an advantage through years of hard work.”

Gangubai Hangal (1913–2009) Indian singer

Deepa Ganesh, in "Gangubai's search for perfection."

Amrita Sher-Gil photo

“An Indian with a measure of European blood, she returned to India to shed her acquired skin…. She saw her country with new vision and has left a legacy of pictures simple and grand…as a tribute to the Indian countryside and its people.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Maic Casey in [Mitter, Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-1947, http://books.google.com/books?id=krdWkzVLSbkC&pg=PA236, 2007, Reaktion Books, 978-1-86189-318-5, 45]

Bal Gangadhar Tilak photo

“Love of India was the breath of life with Mr. Tilak and in it he has left to us a treasure, which can only increase, by use. The endless procession of yesterday shows the hold the great patriot had on the masses.”

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) Indian independence activist

Mahatma Gandhi, Selected Letters: Gandhi -Tilak Correspondence, 29 November 2013, MK Gandhi organization http://www.mkgandhi.org/Selected%20Letters/gandhi-tilakcorr.htm,

Allen West (politician) photo

“Life of Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists. Astonishing really that he should be so little known, should have left so little impression.. Strangely thrilling that St Paul - end of the eighteenth century!”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

should have prayed all his life for the conversion of England, pledging his sons to do likewise. Once, during Mass, he had a vision of my sons in England. But only in 1841, almost seventy years after his death, did they actually set foot on English soil - through Fr Dominic Barberi. It was he who received Newman into the Church..
Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

George Stephenson photo
Paul Scholes photo

“Scholes was England’s best football player. It was impossible to take the ball from him, and he never mishit a pass. He did not belong on the left flank but that’s where we needed him most. He had played on the left in the qualifying campaign, and sometimes even at Manchester United.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england/10426976/Sven-Goran-Erikssons-book-Paul-Scholes-was-Englands-best-football-player-but-was-held-back-by-asthma.html
Sven-Göran Eriksson

Louise Brooks photo
Ken MacLeod photo

“Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons.”

Ken MacLeod (1954) Scottish science fiction writer

USENET posting to rec.sf.arts.fandom http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.fandom/browse_frm/thread/303b0da0ab25aee/b12adceacd343279 28 September 2000, in the discussion of Robert A. Heinlein's quote "The cowards never started and the weaklings died on the way." (Expanded Universe, How to be a Survivor in the Atomic Age)
Other sources

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo

“All this will have left you disposed to understand one of our principal Futurist efforts, which consists of abolishing in literature the apparently indissoluble fusion of the two concepts of Woman and Beauty.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

This ideological a fusion has reduced all romance to a sort of heroic assault that a bellicose and lyrical male launches against a tower that bristles with enemies, a story which ends when the hero, now beneath starlight, carries the divine Beauty-Woman away to new heights. Novels such as Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo or Salammbô by Flaubert can clarify my point. It is a matter of a dominant leitmotif, already worn out,c of which we would like to disencumber literature and art in general.
1910's, Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine' 1911
Source: Poggi, Christine, and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism: An Anthology. Yale University Press, 2009. p. 89

KT Tunstall photo

“Many good things come from the left!”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

at the House of Blues on August 12th, 2008, while instructing the crowd to do a 'side-wave.'

Stella Vine photo

“The art world is really exactly the same as the sex industry: you have to be completely on guard, you will get shafted, fucked over left, right and centre. And you will also meet charming, wonderful people like a rainbow at the end of the day.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Source: David Smith, "Art? It's like the sex trade", http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1759321,00.html The Observer, (2006-04-23) : On the art world.

Khaled Hosseini photo

“It does not frighten me to leave this life that my only son left five years ago, this life that insists we bear sorrow upon sorrow long after we can bear no more. No, I believe I shall gladly take my leave when the time comes. What frightens me, hamshira, is the day God summons me before him and asks, Why did you not do as I said, Mullah? Why did you not obey my laws? How shall I explain myself to him, hamshira?”

What will be my defense for not heeding His commands? All I can do, all any of us can do, in the time we are granted, is to go on abiding by the laws He has set for us. The clearer I see my end, hamsira, the nearer I am to my day of reckoning, the more determined I grow to carry out His word. However painful it may prove.
Talib Judge, p. 366
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

Pierre Bourdieu photo
Ferenc Puskás photo

“He had a roly poly physique but a wonderful left foot and he was a brilliant finisher. I would put Puskas in any list of all time greats.”

Ferenc Puskás (1927–2006) Hungarian-Spanish association football player

Preston and England legend Sir Tom Finney

R. A. Lafferty photo
Zinedine Zidane photo

“In France, everybody realized that God exists, and that he is back in the French international team. God is back, there is little left to say.”

Zinedine Zidane (1972) French association football player and manager

Thierry Henry, 2005 http://www.soccerway.com/news/2005/august/5/henry-hails-god-zidane/

“I think that Mr Rajaratnam has left an imprint on the Foreign Service of Singapore that it is a foreign policy of ideas.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

Professor Chan Heng Chee, Singapore Ambassador to the United States.

Ptolemy photo
Jeff Buckley photo
Howard Carter photo

“With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner… widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in… at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker. Presently, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.”

Howard Carter (1874–1939) British egyptologist

For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously "Can you see anything?", it was all I could do to get out the words "Yes, wonderful things".
Tutankhamen and the Glint of Gold http://www.fathom.com/feature/190166/index.html
Diary, 26 November 1922.

Claude Lévi-Strauss photo

“The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.
Notes in an early work, often cited as an extreme example of androcentrism, even among leading anthropologists, " Contribution à l'étude de l'organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/jsa_0037-9174_1936_num_28_2_1942?_Prescripts_Search_tabs1=standard&" (1936) p. 283

William S. Burroughs photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Salvador Dalí photo

“Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency... Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from Entretiens avec Salvador Dali, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as cited in The shameful life of Salvador Dali, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Jussi Halla-aho photo

“Amount of rapes are increasing. Because therefore more and more women will be raped, my earnest wish is that right women will be raped by predators choosing their victims randomly. Green-left-winger reformers and their voters. Rather them than others. Nothing else will work for them, but multiculture that hits their own ankle.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2006), published in the blog Scripta [original finnish text] in http://www.halla-aho.com/scripta/monikulttuurisuus_ja_nainen.html, December 20, 2006
2005-09

Derek Fowlds photo

“In the end, they’ll be remaking Heartbeat. I’ve said why don’t they put bloody Heartbeat on ITV? Show it again from the beginning. They were brilliant shows for the first six years. It all changed when Nick Berry and Bill Maynard left. At the end we were still getting seven million viewers.”

Derek Fowlds (1937–2020) British actor

Quoted in the Mirror - Yes Minister and Heartbeat star Derek Fowlds dead at 82 https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/breaking-yes-minister-heartbeat-star-21299216?_ga=2.64592495.1773683324.1579285563-54887874.1579285563

Pierce Brown photo
Alan M. Dershowitz photo
Teal Swan photo
Thurgood Marshall photo
André Aciman photo
Rudyard Kipling photo

“I left home young. I returned old;
Speaking as then, but with hair grown thin;
And my children, meeting me, do not know me.
They smile and say: "Stranger, where do you come from?"”

He Zhizhang (659–744) Chinese writer

(zh-TW) 少小離家老大回,鄉音無改鬢毛衰。
兒童相見不相識,笑問客從何處來。
"Coming Home" (《回乡偶书》) in Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, trans. Witter Bynner

William H. McRaven photo

“As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

William H. McRaven (1955) United States admiral

McRaven wrote in a February 20 editorial in the Washington Post about the dismissal by the president of the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, for having briefed congressional intelligence committee members about emerging evidence of foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/william-mcraven-if-good-men-like-joe-maguire-cant-speak-the-truth-we-should-be-deeply-afraid/2020/02/21/2068874c-5503-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html

Johannes Kepler photo
Steven Crowder photo
Andrea Dworkin photo
Uwem Akpan photo
June Downey photo