Top 461 Liberalism Quotes & Sayings

Liberalism is a creation of the seventeenth century, fathered by British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). For Locke, liberalism means limited government, the rule of law, due process, liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, separation of church and state, and separation of government powers into branches that oversee each other's authority.

I think I know a lot of fake two-faced Ivy League liberals, and I am constantly testing them to see if their liberalism is a conversational liberalism, one that depends solely on what will fly at a party. And I can tell when stuff like this happens, I swear to God, they are tomorrow's conservatives.

I am a conservative. I have said I don't know how many times, conservatism is an intellectual pursuit. And by that I mean liberalism's easy. Liberalism is the most gutless, easy choice. It's not even a choice. Liberalism is just, you feel it. And there's nothing hard about it at all. You don't even have to do anything. You just have to notice suffering and talk about how it. And you're a great, big-hearted, compassionate person.

My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life.

Leftists are activists. This is a strategy. Liberalism, communism, socialism, you don't need to go too deep - a peripheral study of Marxism. And you'll learn that Marxism, leftism, liberalism, they have long-term strategies for taking over and controlling whole populations. It is their objective.

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?

Liberalism should be found not striving to spread bureaucracy but striving to set bounds to it. True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of all other blessings and benefits is vain. That belief is the foundation of all American progress, political as well as economic.

Liberalism is easy because it's emotion. You don't have to do anything to solve the problem. You just have to act like you care about it. Look at the liberalism that's on display. It's enraged; it is causing riots; it is endangering people.

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics.

Liberalism is a mental disorder.

Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused.

There is an initial modesty in Liberalism. Liberalism was not originally a doctrine of "man is the king." No, it was a very modest attempt to build a space where people could live together without slaughtering one another.

Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority ... a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State.

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

Liberalism is financed by the dividends from Conservatism.

This is a hallmark trait of the left. There is never any effort to elevate anybody. Liberalism is all about tearing down. Liberalism is all about lowering. It is all about destroying 'em.

Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’… In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

Liberalism isn't change. It has to be imposed.

Economic knowledge necessarily leads to liberalism

Every subsection of liberalism is always busy attacking another subsection of liberalism, because god forbid they should all band together and actually fight for the cause.

If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.

Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I'm stepping over it.

I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy - that's what the Democratic party ought to reach for.

I've always said, "I love the women's movement, especially when walking behind it." And I have never understood why it is that people - you know, I hate liberalism. I'm totally opposed to liberalism. I do not like that at all.

Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything it encompassed.

Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] ... by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks ... to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

You can describe Christianity and you can also describe liberalism. Christianity has certain beliefs, tenets, doctrines. Not all Christians are always living up to them. Similarly, not all liberals are living up to the tenets of liberalism.

One of my quests from the beginning has been to inform people, educate people, sort of train people, if you will, to spot liberalism. The belief that liberalism is the source of the vast majority of our problems, clearly not all, but the vast majority, liberals and liberalism, and the more people trained to spot it, I think, have always believed that it would go a long way to go in defeating it. I think it does need to be defeated.

The issue of religious liberty is absolutely critical. America was founded on three different types of liberty: political liberty, economic liberty, and religious and civil liberty. It's remarkable that, one-by-one, these strands of liberty are coming under fierce attack from the Left. And that's particularly ironic because "liberal" derives from a word which means "liberty," the free man as opposed to the slave. This liberalism which we're saddled with today isn't a real liberalism at all, but a gangster style of politics masquerading as liberalism.

Liberalism doesn't speak to ideals. Radicalism does.

The more people that understand and are made able to spot liberalism, and then the more people are able to associate liberalism with the problems in their lives, the political problems, the economic problems, the more people can be conditioned and educated to understand that liberalism is the problem, coupled with the ability to spot it, would be the fastest way to eradicate it. It would be really helpful if we had a Republican Party engaged in this.

What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion is the fact that the patron saint of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that barbarian peoples like the Indians were unfit for self-rule.

As far as Bernie Sanders is concerned, he is a decent, honest person, and I supported him. What he means by socialism is New Deal Liberalism. In fact, his actual policies would not have been a great surprise to General Eisenhower. The fact that this is called a "political revolution" is a sign of how far to the right the political spectrum has shifted, mainly in the last 30 years since the neoliberal programs began to be instituted. What he was calling for was a restoration of something like New Deal Liberalism, which is a very good thing.

Conservatism, by itself, is not the defeating agent for liberalism today. At one point I was among many who thought it would be. It's too bifurcated. It's too disjointed. It's too fractured, too un-unified, disunified, whatever, to be a formative opposition force. But there are still millions of people that want nothing to do with what liberalism and the Democrats stand for.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e.g., social conservatives) of today want family values, less government, and maintain the traditions of society (at least in America's case). However, we must face the cultural contradiction of capitalism: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumer culture, undermines the values which render capitalism possible

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid.

Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.

One of the biggest differences between liberalism and conservativism these days, is that conservativism isn't what conservativism should be, and liberalism is what liberalism ought not to be.

Liberalism has never been about establishing a universal standard. Liberalism is simply intellectual cover for those wanting to gain political power and increase the size of the state.

I'll go through all of [12 steps for people who say are traumatized by the election], but a sample: Volunteer to fight Islamaphobia. Join the ACLU. Donate to Planned Parenthood. Take down sexism and misogyny. Sort of all the stations of the cross of liberalism. Sort of all the stations of the cross of liberalism.

No one is responsible under liberalism.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.

There is nobody better at deconstructing liberals than me. If there is, I haven't met 'em. This is not a brag. It's a statement of fact. Because I've spent my life studying them so that I can predict them, so that I can warn people, because liberalism is destructive, as we've seen our whole lives. Aspects of liberalism in America under its control are in rotten shape, they're in horrible, rotten shape, and the people that live under liberal control are miserable and unhappy and constantly enraged.

It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

If Trump does not start seeing things through an ideological prism, he will never understand the method, the motive, and the how and why these attacks against him happen. He doesn't see liberalism, and because he doesn't see liberalism, he can be outfoxed by it every day. He's not an ideological person.

The man in liberalism is usually going to be at fault.

Liberalism is unsustainable. When things go wrong in liberalism they pile more liberalism on top. Pretty good example of what's wrong with the US budget, US healthcare. Liberalism breaks it. Government breaks it. They pile more liberalism on top of it until it eventually implodes, like Obamacare is going to, or like Social Security is going to. All of these things, they're not sustainable, because liberalism isn't.

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

Liberalism means well, but it destroys