Top 100 Quotes About Conservatism
#1. Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.
Agnes Repplier
#2. Companionate Conservatism - Making the streets safer before people are kicked out onto them.
Dennis Miller
#3. Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.
Herbert Spencer
#4. I love America. I'm concerned about America and I believe the heart and soul of conservatives and Republicans recognize that the principles that Donald Trump is talking about have nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with keeping America strong.
Mitt Romney
#5. Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and 'zombie' financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.
Thomas Frank
#7. Conservatism must be based on allowing everyone to become an owner - equity for everyman.
John Redwood
#8. You know, conservatism is not a bad thing. It's not a pejorative.
Michael Steele
#9. Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
Jill Lepore
#10. Sensible conservatism is better than arrogant and stupid fanaticism.
Neville Stocks
#11. By the eighteenth century many were showing all the negative conservatism of a vested interest overtaken by events: dogged devotion to old techniques, suspicion of innovation, resentment of competition and xenophobia.
Timothy C.W. Blanning
#12. Not my political ideas. Conservatism didn't buy this house. First and foremost I'm a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.
Rush Limbaugh
#13. I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.
Ronald Reagan
#14. The publication of Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 is rightly seen as the first shot in the intellectual battle that was to turn the tide in favor of conservatism i.e. non-statist liberalism .
E. J. Dionne
#15. Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
Roger Scruton
#16. Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.
Rick Perlstein
#17. Japan's biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.
Tadashi Yanai
#18. Reagan would be well advised to find his conservatism in the Constitution rather than to adopt a conservative populism. If he does the latter, he is likely to discover that the radical means of populism will overcome and outlast the conservative ends.
Harvey Mansfield
#19. Sen. Rand Paul is a Different Kind of Republican. He will drag the party, kicking and screaming, toward a new kind of conservatism that appeals more to today's youth, who embrace liberty and are skeptical of foreign intervention.
Alex Pareene
#20. All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its intense fear of autonomy.
Suzanne La Follette
#21. I come by my conservatism authentically, not by convenience. And I offer the American people a new direction.
Rick Perry
#22. Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is ... Paul Ryan.
Charles Krauthammer
#23. There is no conservatism that will stand out against self-interest.
Homer B. Hulbert
#24. Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
Thorstein Veblen
#25. But you say you are conservative - eminently conservative - while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
George Haven Putnam
#26. I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.
Victoria Woodhull
#27. All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics - they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside.
Peter Watts
#28. Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
Walter Lippmann
#29. Entwined with the strand of conservatism in the Democratic party is the strand of empiricism.
Dean Acheson
#30. Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.
Jill Lepore
#31. All I do is convert liberals to conservatism. That's what I do, and that's why they don't like me.
Rush Limbaugh
#32. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.
Barry M. Goldwater
#34. There is such a thing as caste, even in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.
David Frum
#36. One of the litmus tests for judicial conservatism is the idea of judicial restraint - that courts should give substantial deference to the decisions of the political process. When Congress and the president enact a law, conservatives generally say, judges should avoid 'legislating from the bench.'
Jeff Greenfield
#37. 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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#38. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
Roger Scruton
#39. Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#40. What I have advocated is not wild radicalism. It is the highest and wisest kind of conservatism.
Theodore Roosevelt
#41. Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
William Ewart Gladstone
#42. Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
Brian Eno
#43. Conservatism has always meant more to me than simply sticking up for private property & free enterprise. It has also meant defending our heritage & preserving our values.
Gerald R. Ford
#44. I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.
Romola Garai
#45. Condemnatory conservatism isn't anything I'm interested in.
David Brudnoy
#46. I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
Oliver Stone
#47. Conservatism is affecting the way women perceive who they are in the world.
Cate Blanchett
#48. To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.
Thomas Merton
#49. Because, you know, you're in Utah. And because of its political conservatism, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Robert Redford
#50. People want results. I call it 'results oriented conservatism,' R.O.C. because that's what people want out of government.
Bob McDonnell
#51. I'm very much engaged in the political battles, but I'm doing it as a supporter of Republicans out of conservatism rather than an active candidate.
Mitt Romney
#52. God transcends and encompasses conservatism and liberalism, certainty and doubt, simplicity and complexity, Divinity and humanity, crucifixion and resurrection.
Amos Smith
#53. Caution and conservatism are expected of old age; but when the young men of a nation are possessed of such a spirit, when they are afraid of the noise and strife caused by the applications of the truth, heaven save the land! Its funeral bell has already rung.
Henry Ward Beecher
#54. 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.
Tim Montgomerie
#55. I'm innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.
Laurie Simmons
#56. Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.
Douglas Wilson
#57. Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
Sigmund Freud
#58. Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo -
Steve Toltz
#59. I'm not poor now, but unlike some of my friends who are now rich, I haven't embraced conservatism and religion. I'm not opposed to religion if you keep it out of my life.
Joe R. Lansdale
#61. Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny. It's the only one. It's based on thousands of years of human experience. There is nothing narrow about the conservative philosophy. It's a liberating philosophy. It is a magnificent philosophy. It is a philosophy for the ages, for all times.
Mark R. Levin
#62. Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.
James Russell Lowell
#63. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man's spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand, - in the name of a concern for "human beings" - regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society.
Barry Goldwater
#64. Obamacare notwithstanding, the current president's progressive instincts have been neutered by the rise of the Tea Party and Luddite conservatism.
Richard Corliss
#65. "Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.
Mark Steyn
#67. Conservative ideas are alive and dynamic, the result of a free and intellectually honest vision for the country. As long as conservatism is strong, the future of a strong America is assured.
Rush Limbaugh
#68. I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
Tom Stoppard
#69. Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T
Yuval Levin
#70. The trouble with traditional American conservatism is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness, irresponsibility.
Irving Kristol
#71. All Taleban are moderate. There are two things: extremism ["ifraat", or doing something to excess] and conservatism ["tafreet", or doing something insufficiently]. So in that sense, we are all moderates - taking the middle path.
Mohammed Omar
#72. A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic; reformism is basically optimistic.
Gough Whitlam
#73. Success breeds conservatism, and that means a love affair with the status quo and an aversion to change.
Frank Popoff
#74. Compassionate conservatism [is] most importantly, making sure that government is not the answer to people's problems.
George W. Bush
#75. [Conservatism is] a fight for keeping these qualities that made us move unceasingly.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
#76. I think the most basic difference between Liberalism and Conservatism today, at its core, is that Conservatives just seem to want a better world for themselves - while Liberals just seem to want a better world.
Derek R. Audette
#77. American Conservatism is finished, and its remaining adherents are, whether they know it or not, merely ghosts wandering, mazed, in the daylight.
Revilo P. Oliver
#78. The first few years after Samuel came to Salinas Valley there was a vague distrust of him. And perhaps Will as a little boy heard talk in the San Lucas store. Little boys don't want their fathers to be different from other men. Will might have picked up his conservatism right then.
John Steinbeck
#79. When the Republican Party is no longer the party of fiscal conservatism then clearly I would argue that we've lost our way.
Bobby Jindal
#80. Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar ... Innovation is bad form.
Thorstein Veblen
#81. Tulsa has world-class opera and Starbucks, and a religious conservatism that rules public life.
Anne Hull
#82. I realized that conservatism was the philosophy that best suited me, with its emphasis on individual liberty, personal responsibility, and merit.
Mark R. Levin
#83. Here lies one of the world's rare generalized TINAs. There Is No Alternative to creativity and innovation: these days, obscurantism and conservatism will do for you every time.
Robert Heller
#84. Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.
Niles Eldredge
#85. Alas, in 1929 came the Stock Market crash and everything changed and became worrisome. People started practicing conservatism because of financial losses, myself included.
Pola Negri
#86. Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it's read, and by the time it's trendy it's already a force for conservatism?
Julian Barnes
#87. I am not a conservative - neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook ... I just do not happen to be that animal.
Allan Bloom
#88. There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say.
Charles Hazlewood
#89. Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#90. For nearly a decade Democrats have sought a religious wedge issue that could separate big chunks of white evangelical voters from their Republican home. Now they've found it, and are thrusting at the Social Darwinist/Ayn Rand underbelly of American conservatism.
Marvin Olasky
#91. Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
Christopher Lasch
#92. I don't really like labels in politics, but I will gladly accept the label of conservatism.
Marco Rubio
#93. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
Robertson Davies
#94. Conservatism is not a doctrine of contentment. Not a doctrine for the satisfied and the smug. It's a politics that's at war with the world.
Thomas Frank
#95. The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
Christopher Lasch
#96. Plus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.
Deborah Smith
#97. Conservatism has always been about reforming government and solving problems, and that's why the conservative movement should lead on immigration reform.
Marco Rubio
#98. 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
#99. I call my philosophy and approach compassionate conservatism. It is compassionate to actively help our fellow citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on responsibility and results. And with this hopeful approach, we will make a real difference in people's lives.
George W. Bush
#100. In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo.
Tony Campolo
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