155 Quotes by David Horowitz

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.