Political Left Quotes

#1. The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.

Thomas Sowell

#2. The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.

Amos Oz

#3. Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

Stanley Fish

#4. My mum is very political - left wing - and my dad was in the advertising business. They were both from the East Coast: Boston and New York City, respectively.

Joan Cusack

#5. In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.

Richard Dawkins

#6. ANYONE who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them - instead of answering their arguments.

Thomas Sowell

#7. The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Thomas Sowell

#8. I keep wondering if everybody on the political left had someone who they were separated at birth from.

Abigail Disney

#9. I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.

Andre Dubus III

#10. What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.

Thomas Sowell

#11. Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY. The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent.

Steven Pinker

#12. What the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.

Thomas Sowell

#13. No matter whether it's someone from the political left or right, we just need a voice to stand up and defend animal rights.

Brigitte Bardot

#14. If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.

Thomas Sowell

#15. The political left, which holds itself as progressive, rational and fact-based, is becoming an enemy of academic inquiry, and a practitioner of thought control on a wide variety of issues. Increasingly, from the left's perspective, there is just one acceptable viewpoint.

David Limbaugh

#16. While the political right may moralize sex, the political left is doing it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.

Jonathan Haidt

#17. Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.

Ludwig Von Mises

#18. Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

Richard Perle

#19. For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their 'freedom deficit' signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies.

Elliott Abrams

#20. If moral knowledge is impossible, then we are left with only political and legal measures to coerce people into compliance.

Nancy Pearcey

#21. the Los Angeles Times surmised that "hippies, property owners, . . . and police are involved in a conflict with social overtones that far transcend Venice." The police hated the hippies, "whom they regarded as wastrels infiltrated by hard-core criminals and left-wing political extremists.

John McMillian

#22. American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

Noam Chomsky

#23. Politically I am neither left nor right! And this kind of political-ethical standpoint
being in the middle
usually brings about seclusion and isolation! But now I do not mind it anymore and, instead, I work more and more in my self-made solitude!

Javad Alizadeh

#24. Every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.

Hannah Arendt

#25. The left-right political dichotomy serves liberalism by not challenging it. Democracy sustains the status quo by offering the illusion of choice with no choice. Genuine opposition can only emerge if there is an alternative story with which to counter the current mythos.

John Dunn

#26. What I've found is that there is a tremendous interest in these issues, across the political spectrum, sort of left-right terms we used to describe people don't really hold here exactly.

Robert McChesney

#27. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.

Chris Campanioni

#28. I am a woman that defends animals, right, left, and in the centre. Animals aren't political.

Brigitte Bardot

#29. If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.

Leon Krier

#30. Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.

James F. Cooper

#31. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.

Bob Black

#32. An inability to understand the weakness in his fellow men that left him barely more than competent in the internecine feuding at the heart of the Aelerian political machine. It

Daniel Polansky

#33. For if our bodies aren't our own,
And justice isn't ours,
And our love is just a sin,
And voices by the people
Are no longer for the people,
What have we left to lose?

Phar West Nagle

#34. I read and learned and fretted more about Canada after I left than I ever did while I was home. I absorbed anything I could on topics that ranged from Folklore to history to political mainifestos ... I ranted and raved and seethed about things beyond my control. In short I acted like a Canadian.

Will Ferguson

#35. What is especially irritating about the whole abortion debate is the way the subject has been used as a political football by those on both the right and the left of the political aisle.

Chuck Baldwin

#36. The Greek Civil War led to three decades of illegality for the Left, which had to operate under front organisations. The Cold War entrenched in power - backed by the US and Britain - a monarchist, authoritarian right for whom political violence was customary.

Anonymous

#37. If not met promptly and decidedly, the two portions of the Union will gradually become thoroughly alienated, when no alternative will be left to us, as the weaker of the two, but to sever all political ties or sink down into abject submission.

John C. Calhoun

#38. Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

Hannah Arendt

#39. I don't think that what I'm doing [political cartooning] is necessarily left versus right. What I'm addressing is top versus bottom. If I'm not spending a lot of time making fun of the more extreme elements of the Green Party, it's because what I do is to critique power.

Tom Tomorrow

#40. And thirdly, the FDA occasionally does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.

G. Edward Griffin

#41. This has been the left's technique. The technique is to portray a political enemy of the left as this outrageous caveman or whatever decrepit form of humanity that you can describe, and then assume that everybody else agrees, and then cover the story as though everybody agrees.

Rush Limbaugh

#42. Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left.

John Podhoretz

#43. I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.

Charles Dickens

#44. Look at countries like China, they are determined to dominate all clean technology areas, putting lots of money into wind, solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. America's political impotence, caused by their terrible partisanship, will see them left behind.

Malcolm Turnbull

#45. I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

Margaret Thatcher

#46. There were serious environmental problems left over from the Industrial Age, and the deterioration of the global climate seemed to coincide with political leaders who grew increasingly ruthless. The worst of these was Marko III, known to his American subjects as The Magnificent.

Jack McDevitt

#47. Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it's rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations.

George Pattison

#48. My parents are left-wing, and I would describe myself as that. But also, you know what? I wouldn't describe myself as that. Because I don't have to. Because I'm not a political party. Most people are a little bit of each, and we change our mind on various issues.

Daniel Radcliffe

#49. You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

Nick Clegg

#50. The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything.

Marshall Fritz

#51. The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.

David K. Shipler

#52. Global warming is a political issue. It is as much a political issue to the left as abortion is. It's as big a political issue as health care is.

Rush Limbaugh

#53. Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early '90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

Zac Goldsmith

#54. Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22-out-of-30 top al-Qaida leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.

Barack Obama

#55. People didn't vote left or right in the election. They voted for putting an end to all the primitive political history.

Fatos Nano

#56. Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.

P. J. O'Rourke

#57. The left has been able to destroy conservatives, dispatch conservatives, to ruin conservatives simply on the basis of accusing them or illustrating them supposedly violating political correctness, by virtue of exposing what they think or say.

Rush Limbaugh

#58. My political sentiments inclined toward the left and emphasized the socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.

Adolf Eichmann

#59. A lot of political people, especially people on the left, have forgotten the importance of humor as an incredible weapon, and a vehicle through which to affect change.

Michael Moore

#60. I didn't leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But ... I've never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you.

Chris Abani

#61. Using official government resources to help bankroll an explicit political agenda - whether on the right or left - is flat out wrong.

Gary Ackerman

#62. Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.

David Ogilvy

#63. A wingnut is someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum - the professional partisans, the unhinged activists and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They're the people who always try to divide rather than unite us.

John Avlon

#64. Ward Churchill might be more valuable to the opponents of the academic left employed than unemployed. Above all, he can serve as a living window into the intellectual, moral, and political bankruptcy of the left.

Mort Kondracke

#65. The decision to join or not join a service union, political party or other organization should be left up to the individual. No such organization has the right to take money out of the pockets of state workers without their proper consent.

Matt Blunt

#66. In our national discourse and in pursuing our national agenda, we must never leave anyone behind. We must reach out to the many who may have been disaffected and left confused by political games, deceit and showmanship. The people first must transcend every level of society.

Najib Razak

#67. It's time for somebody to lead all of America's niggers . all the people who feel left out of the political process.

Ron Dellums

#68. We have come to discover what we suspect is a new political mindset emerging among a younger generation of political leaders socialized on Internet communications. Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative.

Jeremy Rifkin

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

Michelle Malkin

#70. You get these insurgent movements of populism, left and right. An insurgent movement of populism took my political party over in the UK for example.

Tony Blair

#71. We are hammered 24/7 with the "far left" and "far right" points of view, pounding us, beating us upside the head with purely political theatrics in order to make us believe it's real. It's not real. It's a con!

Bruce McDonald

#72. People more than ever since I can remember are concerned about being out of step and out of line with their political party and won't cross over. There is nobody, man or woman, who wants to be left out, and people are fearful of that. People are fearful of their leadership as well.

Gary Ackerman

#73. Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect."
"Yes, it is. But it is politically correct."
(The Rise of Political Correctness)

Angelo Codevilla

#74. 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

#75. I have never really thought that the Left was much in 'array' as far as political purposes were concerned.

Noam Chomsky

#76. Everybody in the CIMS database has a number, from minus 15 to plus 15. If you're plus 15, you're on the right of the political spectrum. If you are minus 15 you are on the left of the political spectrum. You are a pinko, leftie, environmentalist, academic probably,

Mark Bourrie

#77. At 'SNL,' I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in '95, I could let my own beliefs out.

Al Franken

#78. As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world's powers go, (Rwanda) might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world's powers left Rwanda to it.

Philip Gourevitch

#79. To write well is to have felt a tingle of joy in your being; to have left a little of your blood on the page' B.J.Kibble, author of DRY RAIN, LEGION, CHASING THE WIND,and CRIES FROM THE GRAVE.

B.J. Kibble

#80. The great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

#81. Once I appealed to distinguish words "gay" and "homosexual" ( ... ). "Gayship" is a political homosexualism, a sort of left-wing ideology based on a bias against traditional lifestyle ( ... ). Homosexualism is a sexual preference.

Rafal A. Ziemkiewicz

#82. Time to pull the plug on the coma of the left, right paradigm

Dean Cavanagh

#83. Certainly on a political and a legislative level, Bill Clinton was effective, but the example that he ultimately left, I think for posterity, tragically, is going to begin with that single paragraph lead with the White House intern.

Joe Eszterhas

#84. I had bought a farm, was trying to rebuild my life and just looking to be left alone. Then I get charged with perjury strictly for political purposes.

Mark Fuhrman

#85. If Bill O'Reilly is calling you a far-left critic, in my book, no matter what your political persuasion is, that's probably - that probably means you're doing a good job.

Michael Hastings

#86. I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.

Robert Burchfield

#87. I don't think Fox News or Rush Limbaugh need Clinton it turns out. I think there's a hunger out there for - whether it's on the left or right - a more lively and provocative type of political journalism. I think Salon and Fox on the other side have both benefited from that.

David Talbot

#88. Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#89. Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means ... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Kingsley Amis

#90. No president in modern times has come to power with less political experience or less managerial experience. On the other hand, no president has come to power with a clearer record of political extremism. As senator, Barack Obama had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate ...

Bob Tyrrell

#91. In the 1970s, 'The Boys on the Bus' exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus - and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust.

Michelle Malkin

#92. I'm a political analyst. I'm a political wonk. I read everything I can get my hands on as a contributor to the 'Weekly Standard.' Of course I read that. I read the 'National Review' on the right. I read 'Mother Jones' on the left. If I want a good laugh, I'll watch MSNBC or read 'The Nation.'

Michael Ramirez

#93. The fact that Obama is getting criticism from the left and the right might reflect his understanding of the underlying political dynamics.

Ron Fournier

#94. What if the new political spectrum has on one side those people who want to be left alone, those who want to be free, those who don't hurt people or take their stuff, and on the other extreme of this new scale stands anyone who wants to use government power to tell you how to live your life?

Matt Kibbe

#95. The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. (The Rise of Political Correctness)

Angelo Codevilla

#96. When I left the Senate in January 2013, I decided to take a full year away from all media interviews, editorial articles, and direct political activities.

Jim Webb

#97. Let's face it. Leftism is the political form of evil. And the left largely controls the modern West. Where, then, does that leave us all?

Lawrence Auster

#98. 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

#99. Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

Doris Lessing

#100. Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.

Tony Benn