Left Quotes | radical journal | Edited by Saswat Pattanayak

Liberals

Thu, 15 May 2008 05:19:52 -0400

We must become the change we wish to see in the world - Mahatma Gandhi

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living - Mother Jones

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime - Jack Kerouac

If you obey all the rules, you will miss the fun - Katherine Hepburn

What a person believes is not as important as how a person believes - Timothy Virkkala

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities - Voltaire

Beware the man of a single book - Bertrand Russell

Prejudices are what fools use for reason - Voltaire

Things do not change, We change - Henry Thoreau

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism - Thomas Jefferson

Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt - Mike Huben

Only the educated are free - Epictetus

There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew - Marshall McLuhan

You must do the thing you think you cannot do - Eleanor Roosevelt

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people - Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

We have lost religion, but we have found humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre

The religious right is neither - Bumper sticker

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions - Adlai Stevenson

If fifty million say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing - Anatole France

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects - Will Rogers

Charity begins at home and justice begins next door - Charles Dickens

Be ashamed to die till you have won some victory for humanity - Horance Mann

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere - Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are two ways to spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it - Edith Wharton

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable - Martin Luther King, Jr

A closed mind is a dying mind - Edna Ferber

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? - Pablo Casals

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way - AJ Muste

The political is the personal - Gloria Steinem

Nowhere does power give itself up willingly - Nan Levinson

If there is no struggle, there is no progress - Frederick Douglass

Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare - Bill Clinton

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body - Margaret Sanger

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be - Lao Tzu

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got - Janis Joplin

The Internet- Last Refuge of the Liberal - Ernest Partridge

With our thoughts we make the world - Buddha

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it - Andre Gide

The first casualty of war is truth - Rudyard Kipling

Its not the voting that's democracy. Its the counting - Tom Stoppard

War is terrorism with a bigger budget - Peace Rally Sign

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?" - Don Marquis

If you want to predict the future, create it - Peter Drucker

One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one - Simone de Beauvoir

After King, we argue how his dreams can best be fulfilled. We forget how significant it is that we no longer argue about whether it should be fulfilled -- Alan Wolfe

And when one of you falls down she falls for those behind her, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and she falls for those of ahead of her, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone -- Kahlil Gibran

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion -- Steven Weinberg

Progressives

Wed, 14 May 2008 05:34:35 -0400

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles - Karl Marx

When the rich make war, its the poor that die - Jean-Paul Sartre

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal -- Jesse Jackson

I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion - Lillian Hellman

War, genocide, slavery results not from disobedience, but from obedience - Howard Zinn

You can cage the singer, but not the song - Belafonte

The Labor Movement: The people who brought you the weekend - Bumper Sticker

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression - WEB Du Bois

Hell no, we won't go (to war) - Anti-war slogan during Vietnam

I am too erratic and explosive to be institutionalized -- Har Dayal, 1912

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven’t melted -- Jesse Jackson

People often say with pride, “I’m not interested in politics.” They might as well say, “I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future, or any future.” -- Martha Gellhorn

It comes as as a great shock...to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance...has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you -- James Baldwin

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair -- H.L. Mencken

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side -- Aristotle

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. If today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't -- Abraham Lincoln

Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance -- Bruce D. Porter

When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes not oppressive; the rational world is my friend because I am friend of its happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government -- Thomas Paine

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire -- Mark Twain, The War Prayer

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual -- Frank Herbert

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs -- Arundhati Roy, Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire

Conservatives

Tue, 13 May 2008 05:34:54 -0400

I'm telling you that President Bush is doing just what Jesus would have done - Bill O'Reilly

Please get me the names of the Jews. You know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats? Could we please investigate these cocksuckers? - Richard Nixon

I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation - George W. Bush

I knew my God was bigger than his [God]. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol - William G Boykin, US Army Lieutenant General, in a speech to evangelical Christians describing his confrontation with a Muslim warlord

The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer - Pat Buchanan, Republican presidential candidate and commentator

I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are - George H.W. Bush, after a US Navy warship shot down an Iranian commercial airliner killing 290 civilians in 1988

Women's liberation and gay liberation are part of the same thing: a weakening of the moral standards of this nation - Nancy Reagan

AIDS is the wrath of a just God against Homosexuals - Jerry Falwell

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. We need believing people - Adolf Hitler

From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce a new product in August - Andrew Card, George W Bush's chief of staff, explaining why the Bush administration waited until after the Labor's Day in its public relations offensive about the need to invade Iraq.

I admire Hitler because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to the power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it - Arnold Schwarzenegger

African-Americans are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares? - Rush Limbaugh

Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free - Pat Buchanan

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity - Ann Coulter, contributing editor to National Review Online, responding to the 9/11 attacks

We found the weapons of mass destruction - George W Bush, referring to two tractor-trailers found in Iraq that had no trace of chemical or biological agents

Those who behave in a homosexual fashion shall not enter the kingdom of God - Pope John Paul II

Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this -- Lt Gen William Boykin, speaking of G. W. Bush, New York Times, 17 October 2003

God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany -- Hermann Goering, speaking of Hitler

Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do - Ronald Reagan

I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God - George H.W. Bush