Top 400 Conservatism Quotes & Sayings - Page 7

This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.

The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past.

Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it's facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned off from picking either of the poisons.

At first, 'Family Ties' seemed to just be a wonderful project of its time. These were the Reagan years, the new conservatism. Alex P. Keaton quickly became the Fonzie of the '80s, so it seemed very much a product of its time. But I soon began to realize that it went far beyond that. These great family shows transcend whatever time they are in.

Voters decided otherwise [on me as a president candidate] and I will focus on my work here in the Senate because I have nine months left. And after that, later, as a private citizen, I will continue looking for a way to contribute to the cause of political conservatism to help our state and our country and the issues that interest me. But I really don't want to be nor do I think that I will be invited to be any candidate's vice president.

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon,for each day to have a new and different sun.

Indeed, while Nature is wonderfully inventive of new structures, her conservatism in holding on to old ones is still more remarkable. In the ascending line of development she tries an experiment once exceedingly thorough, and then the question is solved for all time. For she always takes time enough to try the experiment exhaustively. It took ages to find how to build a spinal column or brain, but when the experiment was finished she had reason to be, and was, satisfied.

Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is "Prove all things and hold fast that which is good" and of the other "Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old."

William Graebner's brilliant analysis of America's struggles over the meaning of Patty Hearst gives us not only new perspectives on the 1970s, on Americans' fundamental understandings of their world in a bicentennial year that offered little to celebrate, but also on the longing for heroism and the desire for belief in free will that Graebner believes structured the rise of Reagan-era conservatism. This is a masterful work of cultural history.

The oldest philosophy in the world is conservatism, and I go clear back to the first Greeks. ... When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

The conservatism is extraordinary to me; just compare the way they dress to the way their parents dress. There are still no tattoos or piercings, which is interesting to me. Why does everyone who lives in one place dress alike, look alike, eat the same thing, and decorate the same way?

Conservatism is about the basic rights of individuals. God created us. As far as the government goes, the Founding Fathers based the Constitution off of Christian values. It goes hand-in-hand. As far as the Republican Party? I felt connected to it because individual freedom should not be legislated by the federal government.

He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

I don't understand how the Republican party is the party with the reputation for fiscal conservatism and fiscal sanity, when they're the ones who run up the debt. It was Reagan who ran up the debt and now Bush is doing it again, and in between, Clinton and Bush's father, I must say, worked so hard to get that deficit and that debt down.

The Africans were oftentimes allied with the antagonist of the Republic. Now, you may want to step back and ask yourself why that might be. It may lead you to a reconsideration of the origins of the nation now known as the United States of America. As opposed to seeing it in the same vein as the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, you might see it in the same vein as the revolt against British rule in Rhodesia in 1965, and, if so, that might help to shed light on why conservatism is so deeply entrenched in this republic.

We rarely use much debt and, when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed rate basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. This conservatism has penalized our results but it is the only behavior that leaves us comfortable, considering our fiduciary obligations to policyholders, depositors, lenders and the many equity holders who have committed unusually large portions of their net worth to our care.

Liberalism, conservatism, that's irrelevant stuff to Trump. He looks at things in an entirely different way. This is a reason why we, as conservatives, have to remain vigilant as we can to the ideological component of what's going on here, because as it succeeds, we need to be able to tell people why it's working and at the same time be able to contrast and say why it didn't work when the liberals ran the show. This is an ongoing effort.

Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.

Buddhism holds that everything is in constant flux. Thus the question is whether we are to accept change passively and be swept away by it or whether we are to take the lead and create positive changes on our own initiative. While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth.

Conservatism means believing in a strong national defense. Not because we want war, but because we love peace. Because history has taught us a painful lesson, that weakness is the enemy of peace. That weakness invites violence, that weakness invites war.

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.

NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative.

Disraeli was now at the height of his fame and popularity. He still had his enemies... But the people as a whole now admired and respected him deeply... His unscrupulous past and cynical opportunism were being largely forgotten or forgiven. He was gradually becoming recognized not only as the prophet of a new Conservatism, at once compassionate at home and positive abroad, but as a great statesmen whom the Queen did well to honour. Power had brought responsibility. By 1878 the transformation in public attitudes towards Disraeli was complete.

The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair.

The United States of America are more of a concept than a historically evolved geographical conclusion, compared to European countries. I find this extremely interesting. Europe seems objectively more progressive and more civilized at a time when the U.S. is entering a regressive, oppressive, totalitarian era. You've got racial issues, the endurance of Puritanism, other seriously anachronistic religious fanaticisms, and it's all linked to conservatism. Despite all the unresolved deep-seated problems, the U.S. is still a country where it's less important where you come from than what you do.

This is the ultimate war of ideas. You're trying to get somebody to change their mind about conservatism, because that's exactly what we're fighting out there. We're fighting an insanely fundamentalist mentality that relies on taking certain things absolutely literally, and they're people on both sides of the conflict doing that. Even now, some people still take the Bible literally, and those are the ones wanting to fight a war against Islam.

Those people who espouse conservatism that causes them to be under permanent attack by the left gay activists cabal, those people are in need of a protection. They're not doing that because it's fun. They're not taking that stand because it's fun, they're taking that stand because that's what they believe in, and they need to have somebody standing up for them, and I'm more than happy to do so.

Conservatism means re-embracing true free enterprise. True free enterprise, which I believe and not because my parents were wealthy, not because I inherited millions of dollars because I did not, but because as I walked on to the stage here today, I walked through the kitchen of this hotel and I met people and shook the hands of people who are doing the jobs my parents once did.

Political monopoly and economic monopoly are two sides of the same coin, two heads of the same monster. Despite all the claims to the contrary, the essential ideology of Neo-Conservatism is to preserve the status quo, with all of its injustices. Its public relations experts call for "freedom and democracy" without a framework of higher values. They fail to comprehend the need for a paradigm of justice and therefore are blind to what concerns most of the people in the world. This failure is the taproot of terrorism.

Fox News has effectively become the establishment. Fox has - you know, during non-election years, really tended to out flank the Republican Party in many ways in its conservatism and yet sort of lists back a little towards the, let`s say right-center establishment type figures in part because Rupert Murdock, whose Ailes`s ultimate boss over at 21st Century Fox, is a bit more pragmatic and centrist than Ailes himself.

One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greater individual freedom grows - is just flatly contradicted by crucial junctures in the country's life, most conspicuously in the 1860s and 1960s, when it's been the federal government that's interceded against the states to secure individual freedom.

For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons' crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.

If you deconstruct the movies that have done well, Pixar-type movies that do incredibly well and make hundreds of millions of dollars, they have a strain of decency and conservatism that maybe even their filmmakers don't even recognize. Yet, we cross our fingers that by mistake, liberal filmmakers and liberal producers are going to by mistake make conservative movies. We have to become invested in it, or else we have no excuse to complain.

Conservatism, we are told, is out-of-date. This charge is preposterous and we ought to boldly say so. The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline. These principles are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation. To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle's Politics are out of date.

In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.

The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the "general principles which are always the same." In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.