Quotes & Sayings About Left Wing Politics

The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them? — Roger Scruton

There is a particular view, still popular among left-wing intellectuals in the West, that the Soviet system was "socialism gone wrong." This thought expresses precisely the major political danger of our times, which is the belief that politics involves a choice of systems, as a means to an end, so that one system may "go wrong" while another "goes right." The truth is that socialism is wrong, precisely because it believes that it can go right - precisely because it sees politics asa means to an end. Politics is a manner of social existence, whose bedrock is the given obligations from which our social identities are formed. Politics is a form of association which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is founded on legitimacy, and legitimacy resides in our sense that we are made by our inheritance. — Roger Scruton

Left vs. Right is an out-dated concept and an oversimplification of 21st Century politics — James Morcan

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies. — Zadie Smith

If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left. — Peter Singer

My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that. — Neel Burton

Left wing ... Right wing ... it's so limited; why doesn't it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone? — Jan Struther

Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too. — Andrea Dworkin

Americans, by which I mean people who live in the United States, are incredibly juvenile about social change. Robin Morgan called it "ejaculatory politics": if it doesn't happen right away it doesn't happen. The Women's Movement in this country has all the same characteristics as the culture that we live in, short-term gratification, personal fulfilment, personal advancement, and yes, coming out as a lesbian can get in the way of that. Liberals and left-wing men have recolonised women around the fear of the right. This troubles me - it makes me feel like we're really suckers. — Andrea Dworkin

Think about the precedents you are setting. It's the Left that runs the world on reckless emotionalism. Don't join. — Michelle Malkin

I'd prefer a world with no identity politics. I'd prefer we judged people according to reason, logic and evidence instead of barmy left-wing — Milo Yiannopoulos

two extreme visions of human nature - a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists - define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies.154 And I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated than either. — Steven Pinker

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country. — George Will

If you say you're a democrat, you're most likely a left-wing liberal. If you're say you're a republican, you're most likely a right-wing millionaire. — Keita Shimizu

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories. — Christopher Lasch

We are all "conservatives" in some sense, because we want to "conserve" some things while changing others. We are all "liberals" because we all want to be "free" in some respects. We are all "progressives" because we want to progress towards something: the question is, towards what? So instead of asking someone, are you conservative or liberal, right-wing or left-wing, why don't I ask what you want to conserve, and what to change, and why? Then we might finally have an intelligent debate about politics. — Stratford Caldecott

Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century. — Tariq Ali

We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren't, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conversative people don't usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren't just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It's all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it's why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning. a character in The Steep Approach to Garbadale: Iain Banks. — Iain Banks

The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there's too much liberal bias ... There's too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes. — William Kristol

There is one great truth in western politics that I have been able to see, and that is this: The more left wing your political ideals are, the more naive a person you are likely to be. The more right wing your political ideals are, the more evil a person you are likely to be. Choosing a political standpoint is largely a matter of deciding which failure as a human you are more comfortable with. — Derek R. Audette

Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag. — Margaret Thatcher

I had been a radical, a left-wing politico, and meeting the Indian people made me realize that the politics of the left and the right were so much less important than the politics of the heart and the spirit. — Larry Brilliant

They [feminists] share the instinct for tyranny and destruction - and they are filled with self-loathing. In the end, leftist feminists yearn to submit to, and submerge themselves within, a despotic monolith. Because they despise their own society and are bent on its destruction, they cannot concede that adversarial cultures may be more evil, because that would legitimize their own host society - and they can't allow that. It would rob them of the moral indignation -- and the identity of being victims -- that lies at the foundation of their politics of hate. — Jamie Glazov

What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun? — Don Feder

Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized. — Roger Scruton

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. — Christopher Hitchens

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . 'Libertarians' . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over... — Murray N. Rothbard

But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power ... They were true believers who meant what they said, whether it was 'No New Taxes' or 'We are a Christian Nation.' In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left's leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or you were against us. You had to choose sides. — Barack Obama

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left. — Christopher Lasch

New Rule: Since Glenn Beck is clearly onto us, liberals must launch our plan for socialist domination immediately. Listen closely, comrades, I've received word from General Soros and our partners in the UN
Operation Streisand is a go. Markos Moulitsas, you and your Daily Kos-controlled army of gay Mexican day laborers will join with Michael Moore's Prius tank division north of Branson, where you will seize the guns of everyone who doesn't blame America first, forcing them into the FEMA concentration camps. That's where ACORN and I will re-educate them as atheists and declare victory in the war on Christmas. — Bill Maher

Mr. Jones's book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: 'How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?' His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage. — Dwight Garner