David Horowitz Quotes

The facts are on our side.

A law is valuable, not because it is law, but because there is right in it.

The killing of a criminal can be moral, but never its legitimation.

The truth is always the strongest argument.

I may seem to quote overmuch. My excuse is the desire to make manifest that back of what I write is the sanction of something stronger than my own unaided thought.

The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.

The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship. The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.

A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.

It is not enough to show me that a measure is expedient: you must show me also that it is right.

[…] the opposite of not wrong isn’t necessarily right.

I just love to defend!

When truth is on your side, you don't need support.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

I think fundamentally, I had to make a decision really on whether this was a film about the past or the present. And 'The Act Of Killing' is a film about the present.

I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

We are the ones who suffer when we hold on to past grievances.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.