Quotes About Left

This is what people have been missing: politics shouldn't be about the dour cultishness and pomposity that dominated the left for decades - it should be joyful and exuberant.

We are moderate, beautiful people, and we are the only thing left standing between Italy and the real extremists.

I don't think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don't think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas.

And as an American colleague said to me several months ago, he said, 'I think the challenge in Jordan - and, again, this is for the rest of the Middle East - we need to define what center is. And once we can define what center is to a Jordanian, then we can decide what's left and what's right of that.

The policies the Left wants to push are both morally and financially bankrupt.

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.

The vision of the left, and I think many conservatives underestimate this, is really a more attractive vision in itself. The only reason for not believing in it is, it doesn't work. If the world were the way the left conceives it to be, it would be a better world than the way the right conceives it to be. It just happens that the world is not that way.

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best—indeed the only—way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.

The characteristic tone of the '60s was that of overweening confidence: we knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash that followed; if the Left is to recover its fortunes, some modesty will be in order.

Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.

the center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather within the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream liberal-social-democratic consensus.

Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against

It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.

place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of 'blacks', 'students', 'women' and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the 'repressive tolerance' of its most advanced forms: precisely

In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that she had lost. (Night Road, page 384)

In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.

It was different when there was a Stark in Winterfell. But the old wolf's dead and young one's gone south to play the game of thrones, and all that's left us is the ghosts.

Being left behind was a special kind of loss. —

If I dreamed, no traces remained in my memory; I simply left the world and life for complete exhausted oblivion.

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.

It's in the best interest of the radical left types - best psychological and strategic interest - to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

We vainly fancy ourselves above the ugly informing and paranoia of the right-wing McCarthy era, but in the 21st century, the Left has fashioned a mirror image.