quotations about conservatives
Conservatives want to make the poor rich, while liberals want to make the rich poor.
MARK W. SMITH
The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
The technical term for conservatives who are not afraid of liberals is: "unpublished."
ANN COULTER
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)
I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
The End of Laissez-Faire
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
The Illuminati Papers
Isn't conservatism in part about resisting so-called new realities when you sense they might be questionable, even as people lecture you that you've got to get with the times?
BILL KRISTOL
"Still a Republican", The Weekly Standard, March 23, 2018
The conservative is a person who considers very closely every chance, even the longest, of "throwing out the baby with the bath-water," as the German proverb puts it, and who determines his conduct accordingly.
ALBERT JAY NOCK
The Atlantic Monthly, October 1936
To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that.
JANEANE GAROFALO
Majority Report, Jun. 3, 2005
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
ROGER SCRUTON
"Eliot and Conservatism", A Political Philosophy
The Republican establishment has decided they don't want any part of conservatism, and this is really not new. People are surprised to hear this. But the republican party formative event of conservativism is Goldwater's landslide defeat. That's what they think of when they think "conservative". They don't think Reagan. They think Goldwater. They believe what the inside-the-Beltway philosophy is about conservatives: they're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, Southern hayseed hicks. They're pro-lifers, they're embarrassing to have to go to convention with them, and they're just embarrassed to have those kind of people in the party.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren, December 15, 2011
Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the most important thing in life... The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting--the wisest religion.
QUINTIN HOGG
The Case for Conservatism
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
A Preface to Politics
Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.
KINGSLEY AMIS
Sunday Telegraph, Jul. 2, 1967
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.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
The Road to Serfdom
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
speech, Feb. 6, 1990
A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather.
JOHN HOWARD
The Howard Era
Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains
The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o' clock and the Conservatives at eight.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I never meant to say that the conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
JOHN STUART MILL
letter to Conservative MP John Pakington, March 1866
Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas--an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives.... Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.
MORRIS RAPHAEL COHEN
The Faith of a Liberal
A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.
WOODROW WILSON
attributed, Democrats and Republicans: Rhetoric and Reality