Top 100 Quotes About Conservatism
#1. You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
Salman Rushdie
#2. Leaders should not just talk about - but walk the walk of - fiscal conservatism.
Michael Enzi
#3. Italy remained attached to conservatism. It had a political class that lived in the past and didn't build the future. The past is our strength, but it risks becoming our ruin if we walk with our heads turned backwards.
Matteo Renzi
#4. It is liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?
Charles Kuralt
#5. If he had a reason for preferring Liberalism to the Conservatism of many in his set, it was not that he considered Liberalism more reasonable, but because it suited his manner of life better.
Leo Tolstoy
#6. When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.
Mark Twain
#7. The ethics of peace is liberal; it's not conservative based.
Henry Johnson Jr
#8. Now make no mistake, I think we need a strong dose of fiscal conservatism in Washington, D.C.
Kristi Noem
#9. They say you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market. Where I should have made twenty thousand dollars I made two thousand. That was what conservatism did for me.
Jesse Lauriston Livermore
#10. There are three principal conservative descriptions of conservatism. 1. Conservatism is against big government. 2. Conservatism is for traditional values. 3. Conservatism is just what the Bible tells us. We
George Lakoff
#11. Conservatism is an active intellectual pursuit; it requires a constant vigilance. It has nothing to do with feelings. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. You just see suffering and say, 'Oh, I feel so horrible!'
Rush Limbaugh
#12. Maryland has a tradition of Democratic Party conservatism.
Bob Ehrlich
#13. As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness.
Meghan Daum
#14. Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.
Frank Herbert
#15. Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
George Monbiot
#16. It is not about Republicanism, it's about conservatism.
Mark Davis
#17. The problem is that too often the only people who can act don't want change. Power doesn't so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.
Jack McDevitt
#18. Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.
A.E. Samaan
#19. RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.
Ambrose Bierce
#20. I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.
Calvin Coolidge
#22. If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.
David Halberstam
#23. Conservatism and passive acceptance...They can't think for themselves.Anything that's too complicated sends their heads reeling.Makes me want to puke.
Koushun Takami
#25. Of late years, however, since his children were growing up, he had begun to value respectability, and had had himself made a magistrate; a position for which he was admirably fitted, because of his strong conservatism and his contempt for foreigners.
Upton Sinclair
#26. The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy is bulls**t.
Lars-Erik Nelson
#28. Most of us don't think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting 'comedic' accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
Alex Pareene
#29. It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.
Andrew Sullivan
#30. So, it's important for us to acknowledge that we're prone to be conservative, and in turn surround ourselves with individuals who will help break down our conservatism.
Shigeru Miyamoto
#31. 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
Lin Yutang
#32. 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.
Rush Limbaugh
#33. [Dagley] had also taken too much in the shape of muddy political talk, a stimulant dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse.
George Eliot
#34. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom.
Ronald Reagan
#35. I think, any politician, you have to hold them to their word. And conservatives run on fiscal conservatism.
Chris Matthews
#36. Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival.
Alfred Bester
#37. Conservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.
Woodrow Wilson
#38. Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals.
Jesse Helms
#39. For many of our shareholders, our stock is all they own, and we're acutely aware of that. Our culture [of conservatism] runs pretty deep.
Charlie Munger
#40. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists.
G.K. Chesterton
#41. But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
T. S. Eliot
#42. But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he's brilliant at. He can't still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.
John Podhoretz
#43. I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don't want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character.
J. C. Watts
#44. 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.
George Orwell
#45. What the heck would the establishment know about conservatism?
Sarah Palin
#46. Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.
Roger Scruton
#47. Social conservatives seem to see a bigger threat to marriage from committed gay couples who want in on it than from straight ones who opt out of it.
Margaret Talbot
#48. He was the rarest of things, a Republican with sex appeal.
David Halberstam
#49. The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance.
Russell D. Moore
#50. The conservative thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.
Russell Kirk
#51. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us. Society is stronger when we make vows to each other and we support each other. I don't support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.
David Cameron
#52. I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.
Herbert Croly
#53. Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.
Romola Garai
#54. There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.
Henry George
#55. Young professionals, I reminded myself, sympathetic as they may seem with a disarming modesty, are always necessarily invested in conservatism.
Stan Goff
#56. I met the president when he was president-elect at a meeting in Austin. He spoke of his faith. He spoke of his desire for a compassionate conservatism, for a faith-based initiative that would do something for poor people.
Jim Wallis
#57. Conservatism solves problems libralism blows em up.
Rush Limbaugh
#58. 2016 is going to be a fight. A fight between conservatism and a Democrat Party that is undermining the very character of our nation.
Carly Fiorina
#59. Sometimes, people forget my record of fiscal conservatism on major issues in the state legislature. The greatest example is my voting against the pension borrowing scheme in 1997.
Leonard Lance
#60. There's no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who'll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!
Sinclair Lewis
#61. -You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
Joseph Heller
#62. I've always believed that conservatism is the politics of reality, and that reality ultimately asserts itself in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#63. American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.
Thomas Frank
#64. The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
Alex Pareene
#65. There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not.
Dennis Prager
#66. It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark.
Edmund White
#67. Mr Palliser was one of those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give to her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and best security for the future.
Anthony Trollope
#68. Conservatism is not about the party, because the party is merely the shell. It is the inside - it's the filling that really means something.
Jonathan Krohn
#69. Governments too steady and uniform, as they are seldom free, so are they, in the judgment of some attended with another sensible inconvenience: they abate the active powers of men; depress courage, invention, and genius; and produce a universal lethary in the people.
David Hume
#70. In many ways, Nixon started the modern notion of 'compassionate conservatism,' which as we all know is neither 'compassionate' nor 'conservative.'
Monica Crowley
#71. Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.
Russell Kirk
#72. The future of Conservatism lies in our beliefs and values, not by throwing them away. We need to shed associations that bind us to past failures, but hold faith with those things that make us Conservatives.
Iain Duncan Smith
#73. Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.
Garrett Hardin
#74. You can recruit the populace conservatism for the interests of corporate conservatism that the two things can be married into one unholy union.
Jeff Sharlet
#75. Conservatism is the cousin of cowardice.
J.R. Ward
#76. The [Sarah ]Palin endorsement as sort of vouching for Donald Trump is all about. She is the sort of tribune of not conservatism as ideology.
Chris Hayes
#77. No authentic conservative metaphysic can be operable when the discipline of God and the discipline of the soul have been ceded to the doxai, the dialectical structures and superstructures of modern life.
George A. Panichas
#78. David Frum has been saying - [Donald] Trump is all about conservatism as identity, not conservatism as ideology.
Chris Hayes
#79. The conservatives nearly always tolerate the demagogue while he is destroying liberals.
Harry Golden
#80. We will not adopt the fantastic hypocrisy of modern conservatism which preaches the values of families and communities, while conducting a direct assault on them through reduced wages and conditions and job security.
Paul Keating
#81. There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.
Sydney Pollack
#82. Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.
Abraham Kuyper
#83. 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.
Criss Jami
#84. Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism ... to ward off threats to her own security and influence.
Bernadette Devlin
#85. Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?
Charles M. Blow
#86. Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am nit so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#87. Conservatism is constitutionally opposed to public reason, and this explains the abandon with which so many conservative pundits embrace flagrant simulations of reason, constructed through the methods of public relations, and exhibit so little regard for the real thing.
Philip E. Agre
#88. Since so much of the poetry machine is consumed in and with the mirroring and the reproduction of what is already preexistent, I don't understand why such paranoiac conservatism is dedicated to labels. It's a way of controlling the "other," to label them.
Fady Joudah
#89. Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#90. The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.
Arthur C. Brooks
#92. Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.
Eric Gill
#93. At its core, conservatism is not an anti-government movement, and it's not a no-government movement.
Marco Rubio
#94. It is a striking example of modern conservatism's emphasis on the moral worth of the individual ... When I look at the debate over Elian ... I have to say that rarely have I been prouder of my fellow conservatives.
Ramesh Ponnuru
#95. I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)
Matthew Specktor
#96. I think essentially corrupting institutions in Washington are turning conservatism into something that is really very creepy, but also emotionally and psychically powerful for people.
Andrew Sullivan
#97. You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.
Warren Buffett
#98. During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.
Yvon Chouinard
#99. Ambition will take you And ride you too far and Conservatism bring you to boredom once more Sit down by the river And watch the stream flow Recall all the dreams That you once used to know The things you've forgotten That took you away To pastures not greener but meaner.
Van Morrison
#100. Pragmatic conservatism is less idealistic than central conservatism. The goal is to get ahead, to serve your self-interest. The idealistic parts of conservatism are seen as effective means to achieve that goal.
George Lakoff
