Top 400 Conservatism Quotes & Sayings

Who knew, in 2000, that compassionate conservatism meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research? A more accurate term for Mr. Bush's political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

Conservatism, I believe, happens to be what happens when people behave according to a certain moral code, a certain sense of right and wrong, people that are accepting responsibility for themselves. Conservatism is what happens when you're a good citizen.

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.

The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems.

You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.

Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments.

The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.

f you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals - if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Japan's biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.

Conservatism in general is bad, and it's racist and sexist.

Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.

Conservatism accomplished a lot of its goals in the latter part of the 20th century. What does 21st-century conservatism look like?

Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

One of the most important things liberals don't understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism's various 'wings,' is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where 'traditional morality' serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa.

Condemnatory conservatism isn't anything I'm interested in.

Paul Ryan is the gold standard for conservatism.

My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism.

The middle classes shouldn’t be getting tax cuts, while those in tough, poorly paid jobs, who are already running out of money at the start of the month, are getting their benefits cut. That’s not one-nation conservatism; it’s two nations conservatism.

Here's an irony of the history of conservatism's relationship with business and business's relationship with conservatism: 'Wall Street' used to be the right-wing industrialists of the forties and fifties' greatest term of derision. (Wall Street was the place that humiliated them by forcing them, hat in hand, to beg for capital).

Conservatism... offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Donald Trump descends in a very powerful way from longstanding tenets of American conservatism, they're just not the movement conservatism we associate with Reagan.

You can recruit the populace conservatism for the interests of corporate conservatism that the two things can be married into one unholy union.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

I think there's a growing amount of confusion about what conservatism is. And it is time for us to understand that conservatism is not built on personalities. Conservatism is not simply built on how angry you might seem from time to time. Conservatism is built on a set of principles and ideas that our nation desperately needs.

In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.

We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism.

I put my conservatism up against anyone. I'm a pretty staunch conservative, with pretty rabid ideas about conservative values... Questioning my conservatism doesn't seem like a particularly interesting project or exercise.

All I do is convert liberals to conservatism. That's what I do, and that's why they don't like me.

I think a Donald Trump presidency raises a new kind of version of conservatism which more closely resembles a kind of Father Coughlin, America first populism and nativism and isolationism, than the confident, modern, cosmopolitan, thoughtful, engaged conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

Conservatism by its very nature is compassionate.

How does conservatism find its way into the body politic? I think most people actually live their lives that way, but they have been poisoned into not voting that way because the brand - conservatism brand, Republican brand - has been summarily destroyed over the years.

Conservatism is not about leaving people behind. Conservatism is about empowering people to catch up, to give them the tools at their disposable that make it possible for them to access all the hope, all the promise, all the opportunity that America offers. And our programs to help them should reflect that.

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.

Conservatism is the politics of reality

Conservatism is the worship of dead revolutions.

The very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

Judeo-Christian conservatism overcomes natural selfishness.

Conservatism is affecting the way women perceive who they are in the world.

What the heck would the establishment know about conservatism?

I'm not denying I've espoused and promoted conservatism, because conservatism's the alternative. And conservatism works every time it's tried. That's the problem. It really hasn't been tried. Even people claiming to be conservative, when it comes time to actually do it, chicken out.

David Frum has been saying - [Donald] Trump is all about conservatism as identity, not conservatism as ideology.

Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.

The real causes of terrorism are not poverty and oppression per se, but rather the bankruptcy of materialist ideologies, like Neo-Conservatism, which promise much but deliver little. The central doctrine of Neo-Conservatism is "democratic capitalism." This is the ultimate oxymoron, because in practice the political pluralism that should underlie democracy cannot exist in a climate of economic plutocracy.

Liberalism is financed by the dividends from Conservatism.

Maryland has a tradition of Democratic Party conservatism.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

We have to make conservatism cool and exciting again.

Government is the enemy of conservatism and freedom.

To complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservatism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization, and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives. From this confusion, from the popular belief that Hamilton was the founder of American conservatism, the forces of tradition in the United States never have fully escaped.

Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.

You know, conservatism is not a bad thing. It's not a pejorative.

Conservatism is not the problem. Conservatism is the founding of this country, essentially. Conservatism isn't even really an ideology. Conservatism is just what is right, proper, decent, and moral. That's all it is.

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.

Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.

I wonder if it's conservative or liberal [ inalienable rights idea], because when we think of liberal thought, when we think about the relation to liberty, we're talking about traditional conservatism - as opposed to today's conservatism, which no longer represents those views.

Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.