Murray Bookchin Quotes

The word conservative has become so loaded by people who are radical and don’t want to admit that they are radical.

When most people see the word "radical," they think that it must refer to something left wing. Some people also may think of it as referring to far right-wing marginal groups. But here we have a president of the United States [George W. Bush] at the center of power, sitting in the White House, who is a radical.

By the end, everybody had a label - pig, liberal, radical, revolutionary... If you had everything but a gun, you were a radical but not a revolutionary.

The worst enemy of the new radicals are the old liberals.

Barack Obama is a radical, and we should not be afraid to say that.

People do not know what an absolute extremist left-wing radical Tim Kaine has been his entire life and they're going to do everything they can to try to mask and cover that up .

Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.

I'm tired of the ayatollahs of the right wing. We're fighting for freedom in Iraq. We're going to fight for freedom in America.

I've been a radical for a long time. I guess it's too bad. I'd be more marketable as a right-wing redneck.

The way that you address this right-wing extremism is actually by putting forward a truly progressive agenda. That's the only solution here.

I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.

The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people.

The election of Barack Obama was a very wonderful step forward for America, which has unfortunately been tainted by the ugly reaction of some right wing activist who are doing their best to cast aspersions on his character and to question his religion and citizenship.

I've always believed the New Left is rank.

I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering... I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside... what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.

Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd suppose.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

Because I'm criticizing liberalism, people automatically call me a conservative. This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid?

The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings ordie. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them.

The goal that the Obama team has is to fundamentally replace the historic America of self reliance, independence, the work ethic, the people who go out and achieve because they spend their lifetime doing the right things and they want to replace it with a politician dominated redistributionist bureaucracy which in the essence would mean the end of the America as it has been for the last 400 years.

These days I am a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist.

Communists are the last optimists.

Abuse of power isn't limited to 'bad guys' in other nations. It happens in our own country. Those in power get jaded, deluded, and seduced by power itself. I have a reverence for individuality. I've always considered myself too individualistic to be either right-wing or left-wing. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. People should be able to be what they want to be and do what they want - as long as they're not harming other people. I am a libertarian.

I have always noticed that whenever a radical takes to Imperialism, he catches it in a very acute form.