Norman Finkelstein Quotes

I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder - as another exercise in self-involvement - rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.

Although I never marched through the streets shouting for Mao, I do believe that the liberation of China at the end of the 1940s was a wonderful thing and to provide its people with a billion pairs of shoes and trousers was a fantastic achievement.

Study Chairman Mao's writings, follow his teaching and act according to his instructions.

We didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left us.

I sometimes think that I didn't leave the Republican Party, as much as it left me.

Mao Zedong's way was to make people crazy. It was like a religious cult.

After President Obama took office, his campaign book 'The Audacity of Hope' receded into his past fast. Its sweet, naive, bipartisan 'let's reason together' passages fell away, too.

Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left.

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the '70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members, but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture.

I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.

We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.

The Conservative Party has abandoned conservatives.

It's almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible.

I'm out of the Republican Party. I'm fed up.

There isn't a day when I don't look in the mirror and think, 'How in the hell did I become a conservative Republican?' It's still a weird reckoning, because it shouldn't have happened.

I was a member of the Nationalist Party for several years. I don't remember how long. Those were very dreary days, because the Nationalist Party... it's hard to describe what it was. I suppose it held on to some kind of little faith, you know? It wasn't even sure what the faith was, and it was a very despised enterprise by everybody.

I have always loved the Mao cap, though I hate violent revolution.

Our conjectures pass upon us for truths; we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.

Don't fall into the trap of believing so deeply in your own ideology that you cannot even see the flaws in it.

A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.

I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.

Any belief that puts itself beyond doubt nurtures its own collapse.