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Liberals Quotes

Quotes tagged as "liberals" Showing 31-60 of 139
Langston Hughes
“Just what is a liberal?" asked Simple.

"Well, as nearly as I can tell, a liberal is a nice man who acts decently toward people, talks democratically, and often is democratic in his personal life, but does not stand up very well in action when some real social issue like Jim Crow comes up.”
Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

James Baldwin
“In any case, it's not enough to be a liberal...That is something that people have a great deal of difficulty with. But it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that. I am telling you this because I have watched what happened to many of my liberal friends when the civil rights movement was in Alabama, let us say, in the Deep South, and they were very indignant. And then I watched what happened imperceptibly but fatally when the same movement moved north to Brooklyn, to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and New York. And their attitudes changed. I really have to put it to you that way, but that is what happened. Their attitudes changed because they began to feel more and more threatened, and a liberal facade or even a liberal attitude was not enough to deal with the speed with which the movement was moving and the complications of American life as revealed in the fact by the interracial tensions in every major city, and being liberal was no defense against that and no interpretation of that.”
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

Martin Luther King Jr.
“The white liberal must honestly ask himself why he supported the movement in the first place. If he supported it for the right reasons, he will continue to support it in spite of the confusions of the present moment. But if he supported the movement for the wrong reasons, he will find every available excuse to withdraw from it now, and he will discover that he was inoculated with so mild a form of commitment that he was immune to the genuine moral article.”
Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Christopher Hitchens
“What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as the brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.”
Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

Langston Hughes
“That evening there were police outside the building in which I spoke, and in the air the rising tension of race that is peculiar to the South. It had been rumored that some of the local citizenry were saying that I should be run out of town, and that one of the sheriffs agreed, saying, "Sure, he ought to be run out! It's bad enough to call Christ a bastard. But when he calls him a nigger, he's gone too far!"...

...Nevertheless, I remember with pleasure the courtesy and kindness of many of the students and faculty at Chapel Hill and their lack of agreement with the anti-Negro elements of the town. There I began to learn at the University of North Carolina how hard it is to be a white liberal in the South.”
Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

Malcolm X
“The liberal element of Whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro, getting the sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, getting the mind of the Negro, and then the Negro sides with the White liberal and the White liberal uses the Negro against the White conservative so that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the White liberal. The worst enemy the Negro has is this White man who runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negroes and calling himself a liberal and it is following these White liberals that has perpetuated the problems that Negroes in America have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, trapped, tricked, deceived by the White liberal then Negroes would get together and solve our own problems. It was the White liberals that come up with the Civil War, supposedly they say, to solve the Negro, the slave question. Lincoln was supposedly a White liberal. When you read the true history of Lincoln, he wasn’t trying to free any slaves, he was trying to save the union. He was trying to save his own party. He was trying to conserve his own power and it was only after he found he couldn’t do it without freeing the slaves that he came up with the Emancipation Proclamation. So, right there you have deceit of White liberals making Negroes think that the Civil War was fought to free them, you have the deceit of White liberals making Negroes think that the Emancipation Proclamation actually freed the Negroes and then when the Negroes got the Civil War and found out they weren’t free, got the Emancipation Proclamation and they found out they still weren’t free, they begin to get dissatisfied and unrest, they come up with the...the same White liberal came up with the 14th Amendment supposedly to solve the problem. This came about, the problem still wasn’t solved, ‘cause to the White liberal it’s only a political trick. Civil War, political trick, Emancipation Proclamation, political trick, 14th Amendment to this raggedy Constitution, a political trick. Then when Negroes begin to develop intellectually again, and realize that their problem still wasn’t solved, and unrest began to increase, the Supreme Court...another so-called political trick...came up with what they call a Supreme Court Desegregation Decision, and they purposely put it in a language...now you know, sir, that these men on the Supreme Court are masters of the King’s English, masters of legal phraseology, and if they wanted a decision that no one could get around, they would have given one but they gave their Supreme Court Desegregation Decision in 1954 purposely in a language, phraseology that enabled all of the crooks in this country to find loopholes in it that would keep them from having to enforce the Supreme Court Desegregation Decision. So that even after the decision was handed down, our problem has still not been solved. And I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the White liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negroes think that the White liberals was going to solve our problem and it is only now that the honorable Elijah Muhammad has come on the scene and is beginning to teach the Black man that our problem will never be solved by the White man that the only way our problem will be solved is when the Black man wakes up, cleans himself up, stands on his own feet, stops begging the White man and takes immediate steps to try and do for ourselves the things that we’ve been waiting for the White man to do for us. Once we do them for ourselves, once we think for ourselves, once we see for ourselves then we’ll be able to solve our own problems and we’ll be recognized as human beings all over this earth.”
Malcolm X

“Can you imagine … it’s now up to the common herd to decide what outsiderism is, and how it should be presented. Real outsiders don’t give a fuck what a bunch of liberal cunts think. That’s exactly what radicals are opposed to. Can you imagine – the outsider without an outside … the outsider acceptable to the flock, the sheeple. Isn’t that the definition of an insider? You can’t be a Gadfly if you don’t piss anyone off.”
Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“We see liberals on social media making serious errors in trying to get movements off the ground. They try one message, and then another, then another, and the thing becomes a bigger and bigger mess. It’s no longer clear what the message is, what the group stands for, what the point is. It’s especially disastrous if a group trying to create a niche position then gets relocated on the bandwagon of much bigger, established campaigns such as veganism, LGBTQIAX, global warming, etc. The group then no longer has its own identity but is just an adjunct of these other campaigns.”
Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Capitalism needs an enemy. If a real one doesn’t exist, it simply creates one … “Marxism.” Since there is no political and economic Marxism in America, the American right have invented cultural Marxism to perform the role of ultimate “other”, the thing to be hated, feared and resisted. What they call cultural Marxism is in fact what sane people call liberal cultural capitalism, i.e. the culture associated with liberal capitalists rather than conservative capitalists. Of course, in the demented minds of the far right, liberalism is Marxism, which is why Barack Obama was routinely branded a Marxist by the far right, despite never espousing a Marxist sentiment in his entire life. Liberal views, multiculturalism, and political correctness are not Marxist. They are liberal. Why would anyone call them Marxist except to demonize them? No honest person would ever refer to them as anything other than liberal, but since when have the American far right ever been honest? Their game is always the same: to generate maximum hatred of anything that is not conservative, libertarian, Confederate, racist, white Supremacist, and Nazi. Marxism is quintessentially about class struggle, about the workers versus the owners, and the aim of producing a classless society where the people are fully in charge of their own lives, and are never the slaves of the masters. Liberalism, by contrast, does not focus on class struggle but on values, identities and “rights”, especially of minorities. Right wingers have confused liberal capitalism with Marxism. Of course, they have done this deliberately to demonize liberal capitalism in order to convert all capitalists to conservative capitalism. They only want to see conservative (right wing) capitalism, or libertarian (far right) capitalism. Everything else is to be routinely denounced as “Marxist.” It’s just the good old McCarthyite tactic – tried and tested over the decades – that right wingers love so much.”
Joe Dixon, The Ownership Wars: Who Owns You?

Edmondo Berselli
“L'imbecillità, si noti, non è né di destra né di sinistra. Vale per gli imbecilli ciò che scriveva il grande storico Carlo M. Cipolla nel suo intramontabile saggio intitolato "Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana": ovvero che gli stupidi si distribuiscono in modo uniforme in tutta la società, senza distinzioni di titolo scolastico, di professione o di reddito. Quindi anche l'imbecille si distribuisce equamente di qua e di là. Magari quelli di destra sono un po' più determinati e sbrigativi ma, se è per questo, quelli di sinistra sono assai più convinti delle proprie idee e, soprattutto, vorrebbero pure convincerti della superiore civiltà e del rigore morale dell'imbecille progressista.”
Edmondo Berselli, Sinistrati: Storia sentimentale di una catastrofe politica

Sherman Alexie
“Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?”
Sherman Alexie, War Dances

Martin Luther King Jr.
“A leading voice in the chorus of social transition belongs to the white liberal, whether he speak through the government, the church, the voluntary welfare agencies or the civil rights movement. Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. In a sense the white liberal has been victimized with some of the same ambivalence that has been a constant part of our national heritage. Even in areas where liberals have great influence— labor unions, schools, churches and politics—the situation of the Negro is not much better than in areas where they are not dominant. This is why many liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing integration in merely aesthetic terms, where a token number of Negroes adds color to a white-dominated power structure.”
Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Martin Luther King Jr.
“The white liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would have for a pet. Love at its best is justice concretized. Love is unconditional. It is not conditional upon one’s staying in his place or watering down his demands in order to be considered respectable. He who contends that he “used to love the Negro, but . . .” did not truly love him in the beginning, because his love was conditioned upon the Negroes’ limited demands for justice.”
Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Chuck Palahniuk
“Liberation has enslaved them!”
Chuck Palahniuk, Adjustment Day

Hari Kunzru
“You do strike me more as the secular type. A believer in progress, religion of the liberals.”
Hari Kunzru, Red Pill

“You can be sure that the elite want to promote the liberal position as much as possible – because they can never be toppled by liberals. Liberals have been bred by the elite to be bland, banal, comfortable Last Men and Ignavi. The elite fear only the radicals – because the radicals are prepared to get their hands dirty. Why are there no statues of Robespierre? Because the elite despise him above all others, and they have succeeded in making the world ashamed of and disgusted by radicals. Like everything else, there are good radicals and bad radicals, but without radicals nothing ever changes. Why are the elite still in charge after destroying the world’s economy? Because they themselves are radicals (bad radicals), and they can never be toppled by weak liberals who’d rather go shopping than protesting.”
Ranty McRanterson, Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men

“Anyone forced to accept a worldview which they entirely rejected was not part of a democracy but, rather, a tyranny. They were being held hostage by their ideological opponents. They were not free citizens. They inevitably saw the elected government as an enemy, not as the body sworn to represent and uphold their interests. When the one-nation democratic ideal – with the government serving the entire nation – was replaced by a two-nation democracy, whereby a government did not serve the nation but only its own supporters and own base, thus alienating those that didn’t support it and rendering them the enemy, it had ceased to be a democracy. Partisan government was a dictatorship by one part of the nation over the other part, not a reflection of democracy, and not any kind of consensual system. Everyone not represented by the government had the right to seek its overthrow. Such a government did not represent the general will of the people, the only means for it to be regarded as legitimate, but instead represented the particular will of one partisan group of the people, committed to an extremist ideology abhorrent to its opponents. To save America from dictatorship, to save democracy, AOC said that it was necessary to divide America into two houses, liberal and conservative, and each would then go its own way, free forever of the oppression of the other. She stressed over and over again that if the gap between liberals and conservatives were small, if it were easy to switch between the two positions, then democracy could function. However, once conservatives and liberals became fanatical ideological enemies, with virtually no one ever likely to swap sides, then democracy was unworkable.”
Adam Nostra, The 2044 War Between Texas and California: How AOC Became the World Leader

“The liberal Left will the ends but not the means, and that’s simply pathetic. The Left will win when it is extremely illiberal, when it no longer takes any shit, and doesn’t spend all of its time bending over backwards so as not to offend anyone. The only people who change the world are extremists and radicals, not liberals and “multiculturalists” who always want to be liked. The people who make a difference are those who know they are going to be actively disliked.”
Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

Christopher     Caldwell
“At some point, Democrats became the party of small-town people who think they’re too big for their small towns…For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”
Christopher Caldwell

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez
“The white people I met were well-meaning, well-read liberal folks who happened to know all the ins and outs of racism and colonialism, but somehow positioned these problems outside of themselves rather than taking ownership of them. They did not understand themselves to be part of the problem, and they did not see themselves as benefitting from these systems of oppression. Many was themselves as strictly allies.”
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

“[About liberals] It's the lack of systemic critique and their infatuation with trendy causes that turn my stomach.

(2002 interview in Attitude)”
Clay Butler

“Liberals have very little interest in actual injustice and are more concerned about the perception of injustice. For example, progressives want to fight racism while liberals want to fight the perception that our society is racist.

(2002 interview in Attitude)”
Clay Butler

“There are no jokes in Woke World. Or, rather, the whole thing is a joke, which means nothing is funny anymore. You need something to be serious before there can be room for laughter. Nothing is serious in Woke World.”
David Sinclair, Without the Mob, There Is No Circus

“The Woke will be receiving ecstatic applause as they order the Apocalypse to submit to Wokeness and to stop being so cruel and heartless. Will the Apocalypse be laughing in response?”
David Sinclair, Without the Mob, There Is No Circus

Jim Lee
“Race and religion have been deliberately conflated. All the intolerant have to do is say that it’s racist, or politically incorrect, or antisemitic, to challenge them, and the cowed liberals immediately all fall into line like the craven little poodles they are. The one thing the fascists can bank on is that if they play the race card, or any other minority card, they gain instant and total immunity. All the useful idiots of liberalism will rally around them and support them. But all intelligent Westerners should see through the scam. Islam is not, and never will be, a race. It has nothing to do with race. It’s a totalitarian system trying to take over the world, and everyone has the right and indeed duty to oppose it.”
Jim Lee, In (Unlikely) Praise of Donald Trump: Embracing America’s Shadow

Bruce Gilley
“Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man. But its debilitating effects on Africa, and on the Congo in particular, make the opposite more nearly the case. It is a callous and negligent chicotte (hippo whip) lash on the backs of all black Africans, narcissistic guilt porn for white liberals at the expense of the African. The Congolese lawyer Marcel Yabili calls it “the greatest falsification in modern history,” a compliment of sorts, I suppose.”
Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

William Castano-Bedoya
“If the liberals truly embraced pragmatism, they would not have relinquished power.”
William Castano-Bedoya, We the Other People: The Beggars of the Mercury Lights

Michael Novak
“Not all of those who cry "The poor, the poor!" will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Michael Novak

Vladimir V. Tchernavin
“The Bolsheviks like to use words they don’t understand—no project can succeed without such words.”
Vladimir V. Tchernavin, I Speak For The Silent Prisoners Of The Soviets

Boris Zubry
“Liberalism is the product of the wildest imagination, but one believes in it to the depth of one's heart. Is it the lack of education or too much of it?”
Boris Zubry