In Memoriam: The 20 Best Quotes About Liberals from David Horowitz

David Horowitz explained the liberal mind so well!

David Horowitz passed a couple of days ago at 86 and it’s worth taking a little time to celebrate what he did while he was here.

I’ve met David Horowitz, interviewed him twice (you can see those interviews here *2003* and here *2010*) and even took the picture that came along with this article in 2011. I’d also add that I read his book, Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey, and thought it was a masterpiece.

Horowitz was a brilliant man who understood the Left extraordinarily well because he was a genuine communist who eventually saw the light. Very few people are as good at deconstructing left-wing thoughts as Horowitz was. It’s sad that he died, but David Horowitz fought the good fight, and the world is a better place because he lived. As a tribute to his life, enjoy his best quotes about the Left.

20) "Shortly after Peter Collier and I first entered the conservative world, I had lunch with Norman Podhoretz, who warned me, 'When you were on the Left, you got away with everything. Now that you're on the Right, you'd better be careful, because they won't let you get away with anything.'"

19) "Diversity - as practiced in today's colleges - is a form of racism, and, in fact, is the most thriving form of racism in America today."

18) "If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?"

17) "The Left's inability to understand the most basic economic fact - that people need an incentive to produce - has caused the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of people - mostly poor - in the last 75 years. But thanks to a politically corrupted media and educational system, their pigheaded pursuit of socialist fantasies goes on."

16) "We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same."

15) "Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear."

14) "Why should half the country fund institutions that regard them as racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and xenophobes - in a word, 'deplorables?' Republicans should use their leverage to represent the half of the population that academic ideologues have put into the basket of deplorables and restore intellectual diversity to institutions that have become one-party states."

13) "For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a moral choice. To achieve the socially just future requires only that enough people decide to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for progressives to consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened while dismissing their opponents as morally repulsive reactionaries, unworthy of the community of other human beings."

12) "For thirty years, beginning with the invention of a privacy right in the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the Left has been waging a systematic assault on the constitutional foundation of the nation. One element of that assault is the transformation of the founding contract into a 'Living Constitution' that can be re-invented at will 'and without the amendment process - to suit the Left's latest, destructive, political ends."

11) "Unless one is blinded by the discredited Marxisms of the political Left, there is no reason that the rich should be adversaries of the poor or oppose their interests. Not in a dynamic market society. Only if the economic market were a zero-sum game, as leftists believe - "exploited labor" on the one side and capitalist profit on the other - would leftist ideas make any sense. But they don't. The real-world relation between labor and capital is quite the opposite of what the Left proposes. Entrepreneurs generally want a better-educated, better-paid, more diverse working force, because that means better employees, better marketers, and better consumers of the company product. That is why, historically, everywhere capitalism has been embraced, labor conditions have improved and inequalities have diminished over time whether there has been a strong trade union presence or not."

10) "In my own passage out of the Left nearly 20 years ago, it occurred to me that my revolutionary comrades never addressed to themselves what should be the obvious questions for social reformers: 'What makes a society work?' 'What will make this society work?' In all the socialist literature I had read, there was hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth, the problem of getting people to work or to behave in a civilized manner. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to the conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else had created. Was it any surprise that socialist societies had broken world records in making their inhabitants poor?"

9) "The more racists you can find under any given bed, the more progressive you will be judged, and the more guilt-free you will feel. Thus, there is a psychological payoff. The more racism you are able to see, the better you can feel about yourself. In discovering racism, even where it may not exist, you are able to realize your own virtue and its self-reward."

8) "For two hundred years the radical Left has believed in a religion promising a heaven on earth whose end justifies any means. That is why progressives like Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot killed so many innocent people."

7) "…(E)veryone knows that racism is not the problem when it comes to low admissions rates for blacks and other designated minority groups. The problem is poor test scores… the inability to compete equally when the rules are neutral and not rigged in their favor. The reasons for this incompetence are many - corrupt inner-city K-12 schools run by liberals and Democrats, lack of stable two-parent homes, and anti-intellectual cultural attitudes. But none of them will be addressed as long as the Big Lie that white racists are holding minorities back persists."

6) "The lesson I had learned from my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst results. I had believed in the Left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done."

5) "An SDS radical once wrote, 'The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.' In other words the cause - whether inner city blacks or women - is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution."

4) "Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don't like to have another point of view in the room that they don't squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling."

3) "Sometimes the easiest truths to understand are actually the hardest to learn. ‘Thinking doesn't make it so’ is one. ‘Just because it feels good, doesn't mean it's good’ is another. The failure to learn these distinctions is actually the cause of liberalism and lies at the heart of the liberal confusion about race. Liberals begin by taking a stand that feels morally right, but the true appeal of liberalism lies in its making believers feel good about themselves. Because liberalism beings and ends in a moral posture, it doesn't require the difficult assessment of facts on the ground to validate its conclusions."

2) "The radical commitment is less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the faith is a traumatic experience because it involves an involuntary severing of communal ties. That is why ‘political correctness’ is a habit of the progressive mind - it is a line of fear that holds the flock in check. No greater caution exists for those tempted to leave the faith than the charge of 'selling out.' Prior to temptation, leaving the faith is inconceivable, a sign that one is no longer a good person."

1) "A key to the mentality of the Left is that it judges itself by its best intentions and judges its opponents - America chief among them - by their worst deeds. Or by the fantasies of what their worst deeds might be."

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