Top 100 David Horowitz Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Republicans lost control of the narrative because they never held the Democrats accountable for their betrayal.”

— David Horowitz

54. “It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a “movement.” It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats’ collectivism and in defense of individual liberty.”

— David Horowitz

55. “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

56. “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

57. “It is the human wish to be told lies that keeps us as primitive morally and socially as we are. But stoic realism is, after all, what being a conservative is about.”

— David Horowitz

58. “In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration, almost three times as many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as in the eight years of the Bush administration.”

— David Horowitz

59. “Trump broke free of this constraint, and it is safe to say that political correctness will never have the stranglehold on public discourse that it once did.”

— David Horowitz

60. “Yet, in the face of this bloody and intensifying Islamist offensive, Obama has tried to convince the American people that the war against al-Qaeda has been essentially “won” – by him – and the terrorist threat is subsiding.1 Denial of the war Islamists have declared on us and denial of the threat it represents is the heart of the Obama doctrine that has guided this nation’s policies for more than four years.”

— David Horowitz

61. “The future is a work of prejudice and malice inextricably bound with generosity and hope. Its fate is unalterably out of our control. Insofar as this work is manageable at all, it is carried out now and forever under the terrible anarchy of freedom that God has imposed on his children and will not take back.”

— David Horowitz

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

— David Horowitz

63. “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

64. “If Democrats call you a racist because you are a conservative or a Republican, that tells you that you are hated because you are a conservative or a Republican; you are irredeemable and belong in the “basket of deplorables.”

— David Horowitz

65. “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

66. “With the support and protection of Democratic legislators, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major TV networks now undertook a relentless five-year propaganda campaign against the war, taking relatively minor incidents like the misbehavior of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and blowing them up into international scandals damaging their country’s prestige and weakening its morale.”

— David Horowitz

67. “Never before in the history of the modern research university have entire departments and fields been devoted to purely ideological pursuits.”

— David Horowitz

68. “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

69. “Life. I didn’t see it coming. That is a theme of this book. In fact none of us sees it coming when we start on our journeys. That is one of the paradoxes of our existence. We are all so different and unique. And yet in several crucial ways we are the same. And this is one of them: None of us sees life coming. Or as the Christian testament puts it: We see now through a glass darkly, not face to face.”

— David Horowitz

70. “As a leftist I had developed habits of mind that caused me to look at “classes” rather than individuals, at social structures and general paradigms rather than at particular events or individual personalities that could be dismissed as incidental or unique.”

— David Horowitz

71. “We are not only losing the war with enemies whose stated goal is our destruction, we are led by a political party that constantly finds excuses not to take these enemies seriously, and never has to account for its disgraceful conduct because its potential opposition is mute.”

— David Horowitz

72. “From the moment of its founding Americans began freeing their slaves – some 500,000 by the early 1800s – and in 1808 outlawed the slave trade entirely.”

— David Horowitz

73. “The current dimensions of the left’s intellectual crisis are more readily grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had illusions about existing “socialisms” and has no attachment, intellectual or visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky’s intellectual integrity and moral courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.4 Yet in a manner that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its.”

— David Horowitz

74. “Islamophobia is the perfect totalitarian doctrine as it is the first step in outlawing freedom of speech – and therefore freedom itself – in the name of religious tolerance.”

— David Horowitz

75. “Civil rights is just one battlefield in the real war of the left, which is the war against America itself. The big guns of this war are directed from the centers of intellect on the high ground of the university culture, where tenured radicals have created an anti-American ideology and forced it on the nation’s youth through the curriculum.”

— David Horowitz

76. “Like most of the left’s leaders, I was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the “dialectic” of history and therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to under-development and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged.”

— David Horowitz

77. “As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.”

— David Horowitz

78. “Any effort to stop the left’s plan for a societal transformation must begin with measures to restore universities to the institutions they once were – to see to it that liberal arts faculties adhere to the same nonideological standards as the sciences and that faculties once again feature diverse political perspectives that reflect the diversity of society at large.”

— David Horowitz

79. “In a free society composed of unequal individuals, the drive to level the playing field is a totalitarian desire and a threat to freedom because it empowers government to confiscate the talents and earnings of some for the benefits of those it favors.”

— David Horowitz

80. “My responsibility as a “revolutionary” was to hurt the United States.”

— David Horowitz

81. “It is an archetypal Sixties case history – the rejection of real solutions in favor of demands that are made with the knowledge they cannot be met.”

— David Horowitz

82. “Why should half the country fund institutions that regard them as racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and xerophobes – 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.”

— David Horowitz

83. “Most politicians use language to conceal what they think. Or to conceal the fact that they don’t think. Many are trained as lawyers and use language to win support rather than to define the truth. Being blunt hasn’t hurt me so far.”

— David Horowitz

84. “If the white majority is racist how can a government it dominates be counted on to redress racial grievances? The question is absurd because the premise is absurd. In fact it is America’s white racial majority that ended slavery, outlawed discrimination, funded massive welfare programs for inner-city blacks, and created the very affirmative action policies that are allegedly necessary to force them to be fair.”

— David Horowitz

85. “The personal dream of every radical is to be at the center of creation and the renewal of the world.”

— David Horowitz

86. “This lack of second thoughts is the telltale heart of the American left. Why no reckoning? Because reckonings are conservative. They counsel against the heedless rush to redeem the ambiguous and mottled realities of the human condition. They prove that life is made better only incrementally and with great difficulty, but it is made worse – much worse – very easily.”

— David Horowitz

87. “Now the Alinskyites had their hands on the federal money spigot. Ohlin and his colleagues directed the very first CAP grant into a program at Syracuse University through which Alinsky personally trained community activists.23 The federal government spent more than $300 billion on War on Poverty programs in the first five years. Much of this money went to street radicals such as Alinsky. During the Sixties, Alinsky’s under-the-radar influence was.”

— David Horowitz

88. “During the Sixties, we also became a culture of splinter-groups, of people who identified ourselves according to ethnicity, gender, special interests – a galaxy of minorities, united only by a sensibility that now regarded society at large with suspicion.”

— David Horowitz

89. “That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not “fairness,” as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom.”

— David Horowitz

90. “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

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

— David Horowitz

92. “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

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

— David Horowitz

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “In fact, however, Kathy Boudin and her comrades were deliberately building an anti-personnel bomb filled with nails, intending to detonate it at a social dance at Fort Dix. The dance would be attended by 18-year-old draftees and their dates.”

— David Horowitz

99. “DePaul University professor Jason Hill is a Jamaican immigrant who is openly gay but politically conservative. Hill describes himself this way: “I’m mixed race, but I’m perceived as being black in America. And, like any person of color who has lived in America, I’ve experienced my fair share of racism. But I don’t see America as a nation of extreme bigotry.”55 In his book We Have Overcome, Hill offers a memorable insight into the paradox of progressives who defend.”

— David Horowitz

100. “In 1971, when still a radical, I wrote a widely-read article in Ramparts attacking the Weather Underground for its terrorist ideas and practices.”

— David Horowitz