Top 100 David Horowitz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— David Horowitz

2. “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.”

— David Horowitz

3. “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

— David Horowitz

4. “Sanctimony is the most inexpensive form of morality. It costs us nothing to make much of small matters in others.”

— David Horowitz

5. “In practice, socialism didnt work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.”

— David Horowitz

6. “There can be no peace with someone who wants to kill you.”

— David Horowitz

7. “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.”

— David Horowitz

8. “A university is not a political party, and an education is not an indoctrination.”

— David Horowitz

9. “If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.”

— David Horowitz

10. “Political correctness is actually a term coined by the Chinese dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong. By “politically correct,” Mao meant adhering to the official position of the Communist Party, which the comrades referred to as “the party line.”

— David Horowitz

11. “If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.”

— David Horowitz

12. “As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, “a new era of economic development and social justice.” The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million Cambodians.”

— David Horowitz

13. “The source of the terror in Lebanon as in Iraq is to be found in the Koran and in the despotisms of the Arab Middle East.”

— David Horowitz

14. “Bunchy” Carter, the so-called “Mayor of Watts.” Carter’s enforcer, Frank Diggs, is one of Elaine’s first Party heroes: “Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges.” Captain Franco describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins.”

— David Horowitz

15. “The lesson I had learned for 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.”

— David Horowitz

16. “It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.”

— David Horowitz

17. “The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.”

— David Horowitz

18. “Cuba’s poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties.”

— David Horowitz

19. “It is the everlasting disgrace of the Clinton Administration that it has chosen to betray America’s heritage as a beacon of freedom, and instead to act as the ally and agent of a police state in retrieving one of its prisoners.”

— David Horowitz

20. “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.”

— David Horowitz

21. “The Book of Proverbs contains a warning that speaks to us in our uncertain state: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”14 Those who believe they are changing the world, or saving the planet, or transforming the human race, are intoxicated with self-aggrandizing pride. As secular “redeemers,” a haughty spirit is their second nature. Consequently, they are deaf to this biblical wisdom.”

— David Horowitz

22. “If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn’t there a black exodus?”

— David Horowitz

23. “You could mention my name in any hallway in any academic institution and you would have people foaming at the mouth.”

— David Horowitz

24. “Israel is the canary in the mine. What happens to Israel will eventually happen to America itself.”

— David Horowitz

25. “Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across.”

— David Horowitz

26. “Reluctance to go for the jugular and willingness to accept defeat can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are reluctant to fight, you are inevitably headed toward defeat when the other side is relentless and despises you. It is only for those who persist in the battle and never let up that the possibility of changing the result comes into view. In.”

— David Horowitz

27. “Black skin privilege guarantees not only exemptions from intellectual and political standards that others are required to meet but from moral standards as well.”

— David Horowitz

28. “It was what I believed to be the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now.”

— David Horowitz

29. “The use of force in Iraq had been authorized by both houses of Congress, including a majority of Democrats in the Senate. It was supported in eloquent speeches by John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Gore and other Democratic leaders. But just three months into the war, they turned against an action that they had authorized, and began a five-year campaign to delegitimize the war, casting America as its villain.”

— David Horowitz

30. “Practicing deception to conceal one’s true goals and regarding moral principles and laws as applicable to others but not to oneself are the core concepts of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.”

— David Horowitz

31. “According to a Pew poll, 49% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? it is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverishment, and human slaughter. That’s what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it’s benign.”

— David Horowitz

32. “The whole history of the radical past, from Trotsky on, warned that my individual truth would have little effect on the attitude of the left. Confronted by such a truth, the left would seek first to ignore and then to discredit it, because it was damaging to the progressive cause.”

— David Horowitz

33. “When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they’re not thinking for themselves.”

— David Horowitz

34. “The only way to bring Democrats down to earth, where they might feel subject to the same standards as everyone else, is to attack them with the same moral force they use to prosecute their mission; the only way to do it is to turn their fire on them. To do this, Republicans need to direct their arrows at the Achilles’ heel of the Democratic Party: its monopoly control of the inner cities of America and its responsibility for the misery and suffering inside them.”

— David Horowitz

35. “In this view, capitalism – the system that supports the democracies of the West and has raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of human beings to levels that only royalty enjoyed in the past – is barbarism, while the system that murdered millions and impoverished whole continents is civilization.”

— David Horowitz

36. “Liberalism teaches those who have fallen behind in the economic scramble to blame others for their failure. This attitude stimulates juices of resentment and deprives its holders of the power to change their condition.”

— David Horowitz

37. “Both Hillary Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the University and stop the trial of Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.”

— David Horowitz

38. “During the Obama years, there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height.”

— David Horowitz

39. “No one is responsible under liberalism.”

— David Horowitz

40. “The catastrophe of every socialist scheme in the 20th century has had a devastating effect on leftwing optimism and has replaced it with the corrosive nihilism that makes it impossible for most leftists to defend a country which, compared to the socialist paradises, is a veritable heaven on earth. All that remains of the revolutionary project is the bitter hatred of the society its exponents inhabit, and their destructive will to bring it down.”

— David Horowitz

41. “The regime of social justice, of which the left dreams, is a regime that by its very nature must crush individual freedom.”

— David Horowitz

42. “As a result of America’s efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks.”

— David Horowitz

43. “If I had a mission to name, it was about wrestling with the most powerful and pernicious of all human follies, which is the desire to stifle truth in the name of hope.”

— David Horowitz

44. “But all our wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to.”

— David Horowitz

45. “Richard Barager has written THE novel of the Sixties – a passion-filled, pitch-perfect, roller coaster of a tale about the decade that divides us all.”

— David Horowitz

46. “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.”

— David Horowitz

47. “For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions – poverty, racism and oppression – for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.”

— David Horowitz

48. “The issue here isn’t whether every student is brainwashed, it’s whether it is appropriate.”

— David Horowitz

49. “Dishonesty is fundamental to the progressive cause since the cause is always about an imagined future whose panaceas cannot pass the test of experience.”

— David Horowitz

50. “Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged.”

— David Horowitz