conservatives quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

What is conservativism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?

Alfred E. Wiggam: 

A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.

Ambrose Bierce: 

Conservative: a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Andy Rooney: 

Democrats (I think to myself) are liberals who believe the people are basically good, but that they need government help to organize their lives. They believe in freedom so fervently that they think it should be compulsory. They believe that the poor and ignorant are victims of an unfair system and that their circumstances can be improved if we give them help. Republicans (I think to myself) are conservatives who think it would be best if we faced the fact that people are no damned good. They think that if we admit that we have selfish, acquisitive natures and then set out to get all we can for ourselves by working hard for it, that things will be better for everyone. They are not insensitive to the poor, but tend to think the poor are impoverished because they won't work. They think there would be fewer of them to feel sorry for if the government did not encourage the proliferation of the least fit among us with welfare programs.

Ann Richards: 

Ann Richards on How to Be a Good Republican: 

1. You have to believe that the nation's current 8-year prosperity was due to the work of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but yesterday's gasoline prices are all Clinton's fault. 

2. You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own. 

3. You have to be against all government programs, but expect Social Security checks on time.

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Barbara Ehrenreich: 

The only truly new ideas [the right] has come up with in the last twenty years are (1) supply side economics, which is a way of redistributing the wealth upward toward those who already have more than they know what to do with, and (2) creationism, which is a parallel idea for redistributing ignorance out from its fundamentalist strongholds to those who know more than they need to.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

Carolyn Heilbrun: 

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidentially expect utopia. Both are wrong. 

Dave Barry: 

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.

Elbert Hubbard: 

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

G. K. Chesterton: 

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

G. K. Chesterton: 

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

George H. W. Bush: 

I'm conservative, but I'm not a nut about it.

Hannah Arendt: 

It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

James W. Skillen: 

American liberals and conservatives share much of the same political heritage. Originally the term Liberal referred to the political and economic ideal of liberating individuals from unrepresentative and arbitrary governments. Early liberalism set in motion patterns for the rule of law that would guarantee individual rights, representation in law making, access to the courts, and protection of private property. Both conservatives and liberals are Liberal in this sense. But whereas American conservatives of various stripes have continued to place primary emphasis on individual freedom, the autonomy of private institutions, and limits to government in the economic area, American liberals have more frequently appealed to government to advance the liberation of individuals from economic, racial, and political disadvantages in society as a whole.

Jane Auer: 

It may be true that the government that governs best governs least. Unfortunately, the same is also true of the government that governs worst.

John Kenneth Galbraith: 

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Stuart Mill: 

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

Leo C. Rosten: 

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Mark Twain: 

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Mignon McLaughlin: 

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Mort Sahl: 

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.

P. J. O'Rourke: 

The Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it.

Paul Weyrich: 

We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.

Paulo Freire: 

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Peter C. Newman: 

Conservatives usually prefer twin beds, which may contribute to the fact that Canada has more Liberals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

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. 
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism is more candid to behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. 
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

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 is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative


Robert Anton Wilson: 

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Robert S. McElvaine: 

Most liberals never lost sight of the potential for evil in big government. They have consistently opposed government power in matters of personal and political belief. Liberals are not unconcerned with economic liberty, but they have come to believe that the common good requires that social justice be given a higher priority than absolute economic freedom. Conservatives are—and always have been—on the other side of both questions. They are much more prone than liberals to limiting personal and political liberties, but they place the freedom of an individual to do as he pleases in the economic realm at the top of their concerns. Social justice has held a lower priority for conservatives, from the days of Alexander Hamilton when they favored strong government as a means of protecting their economic privileges to the days of Ronald Reagan when they see government as an instrument of social justice and therefore a threat to their economic position.

Tom DeLay: 

Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills. [on causes of the Columbine High School massacre, 1999]

Wendy Kaminer: 

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.

William E. Gladstone : 

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.

William Ralph Inge: 

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."

Winston Churchill: 

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

Woodrow Wilson: 

A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.

Woodrow Wilson: 

By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all.

Woodrow Wilson: 

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.