Left and Right

Welcome to Britain’s New Political Order. No passion … No Right. No Left. Just multi-hued blancmange.
Austin Mitchell

The facile leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence.
Karl Marx on Jeremy Bentham

The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.
Irving Berlin on Karl Marx

The left always has an orgasm when it sees a crowd.
Simon Jenkins

The voice of the discontented wealthy.
Nick Cohen on Russell Brand

You can read Russell Brand’s autobiography and dismiss it as rubbish, if you like. Or you can dismiss it as rubbish without reading it, to save time.
Stewart Lee

I couldn’t see him overthrowing a table of drinks.
Noel Gallagher on Russell Brand

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell

An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.
Don Marquis

We should have had socialism in this country long ago, if it were not for the bloody people who became socialists.
George Bernard Shaw

Conservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are.
Geoffrey Madan

That dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.
George Orwell on left-wing intellectuals

I would rather consult my valet than the Conservative conference.
Arthur Balfour

My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a communist at 30, I will do it then.
Georges Clemenceau

There are lots of ways to get socialism, but I think trying to fracture the Labour party by incessant contest cannot be one of them.
Neil Kinnock

We know that the organised workers of the country are our friends. As for the rest, they don’t matter a tinker’s cuss.
Emanuel Shinwell, Labour politician

My epitaph must be: ‘Died of writing inane letters to empty-headed Conservative Associations’. It is a miserable death to look forward to.
Lord Salisbury

They are political Calibans on Prospero’s island, chanting their subversive songs only to each other.
Jenny McCartney on the Left

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
Jack London on strikebreakers

The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.
Oscar Wilde

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned how to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Why do Republicans hate gay marriage so much? They certainly don’t hate gay prostitutes.
Margaret Cho

Its relationship to democratic institutions is that of the death-watch-beetle – it is not a Party, it is a conspiracy.
Aneurin Bevan on the Communist Party

Russian communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.
Clement Attlee

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
Catherine the Great. Attrib.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt

Russia is a collapse, not a revolution.
D.H. Lawrence

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka

It would have been better if the experiment had been conducted in some small country, to make it clear it was a Utopian idea.
Boris Yeltsin on Communism

The Party line is that there is no Party line.
Milovan Djilas on reforms to the Yugoslavian Communist Party

It is a Party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.
Lord Salisbury on the Conservative Party

We will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev at a Kremlin reception

A pig-eyed bag of wind.
Frank L. Howley on Nikita Khrushchev

When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some on to grow so that you can skin them again.
Nikita Khrushchev to British businessmen

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical and social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party … So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Aneurin Bevan

I Told You So You Fucking Fools.
Kingsley Amis’s suggested name change for a republication of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. Conquest had been attacked by the left as a Cold War propagandist at the time of the original publication.

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?
Joseph Stalin, when urged by Pierre Lavel to tolerate Catholicism in the USSR to appease the Pope

The most eminent mediocrity in the party.
Leon Trotsky on Joseph Stalin

Pathological exhibits … human scum … paranoiacs, degenerates, morons, bludgers … pack of dingoes … industrial outlaws and political lepers … ratbags. If these people went to Russia, Stalin wouldn’t even use them for manure.
Arthur Calwell, Australian Minister of Immigration, on Australian Communists

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Brazilian archbishop Hélder Câmara

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don’t feel worse. That’s the ineffectual liberal’s problem in a nutshell.
Michael Frayn

Wonderful theory, wrong species.
Biologist E.O. Wilson on Marxism

Stupid asses.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the proletariat, private correspondence

If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes to be completed they would perhaps show a little more interest.
Jenny Marx, frustrated by the lack of attention given to the publication of her husband’s magnum opus, Das Kapital.

The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Margaret Thatcher

‘To borrow and to borrow and to borrow’ is not Macbeth with a heavy cold: it is Labour Party policy.
Margaret Thatcher

Communism is the longest path from capitalism to capitalism.
Russian joke

It is too early to say.
Zhou Enlai, 20th-century Chinese Party Chairman, asked for his assessment of the 1789 French Revolution. But he may have thought the question was about revolutionary French students.

An ideological movement is a collection of people, many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world.
Professor Kenneth Minogue

I’ve been married to one Marxist and one fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.
Actor Lee Grant