Conservatism In The Us Quotes & Sayings

when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time - that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women's safety and humanity are secondary to men's pleasure and convenience. I — Lindy West

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

Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism. — Abraham Kuyper

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

Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time - that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women's safety and humanity are secondary to men's pleasure and convenience. — Lindy West

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

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. — Beth Bailey

To complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservatism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization, and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives. From this confusion, from the popular belief that Hamilton was the founder of American conservatism, the forces of tradition in the United States never have fully escaped. — Russell Kirk

In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo. — Tony Campolo

If you limit the search for truth and forbid men anywhere, in any way, to seek knowledge, you paralyze the vital force of truth itself.
In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical. His religion has been so long identified with conservation
often with conservatism of the obstinate and unyielding sort
that it is almost startling for us sometimes to remember that all of the conservatism of his own times was against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him. — Phillips Brooks

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

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column - in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally - was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth - Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round. — Paul Krugman

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft's conservatism as compared to Goldwater's said Taft was a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed. — Rick Perlstein

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

In my estimation, there should always be a mixture of economic liberalism - which means small government, a great emphasis on markets - but also a certain degree of social conservatism, not to favor change unless that change is beneficial. So I describe myself as an economic liberal and a social conservative. — John Howard

In my view, the future of politics is, without a doubt, social liberalism married to economic conservatism. Which means we have to make an economic argument to social liberals, that it's OK to vote for us. But we won't run the economy into the ground at the same time. — Louise Mensch

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

I think that stupidity is like a wild fire burning through the social fabric of an intrinsically reasonable existence. — Travis Culliton

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. — Melanie Phillips

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

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

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

The mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in US political life. Is this the really maddening question for anyone else sitting out here watching it all? Why is conservatism so hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw? It can't just be 9/11; it predates 9/11. But since just when has the right been so energized? Has there really been some reactionary Silent Majority out there for decades, frustrated but atomized, waiting for an inciting spark? If so, was Ronald Reagan that spark? But there wasn't this kind of right-wing populist verve to the Reagan eighties. Did it start with Gingrich's rise to Speaker, or with the intoxicating hatred of all things Clinton? Or has the country as a whole just somehow moved so far right that hard-core conservatism now feeds, stormlike, on the hot vortical energy of the mainstream? — David Foster Wallace

Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is [ ... ] often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all. — Christopher Hitchens

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. — Warren Buffett

If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school. — David Halberstam

Established churches not infrequently formed an alliance with the aristocracy , joining arm in arm against change. — John Ferling

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

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. — Joe Wurzelbacher

At a recent conference, a colleague told one of us that in IPCC discussions, some scientists have been reluctant to make strong claims about the scientific evidence, lest contrarians "attack us". Another said that she'd rather err on the side of conservatism in her estimates, because then she feels more "secure." — Naomi Oreskes

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

Jesus does not divide the world into the moral "good guys" and the immoral "bad guys." He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast. This means that Jesus's message, which is "the gospel," is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles - it is something else altogether. — Timothy Keller

Suppose you had to remember to beat your heart, contract in exact sequence the muscles you use for every step ... Conservatism comes out of the body, the sense of many things being done for us that any attempt to re-think, or even make conscious, would fatally disrupt. — James Richardson

when one talks on subjects in which one takes a few ideas that are familiar to everyone, and combines and recombines them, it is easy to follow because these channels are present in everyone's brain, and it is only necessary to recur to them. But whenever a new subject comes, new channels have to be made, so it is not understood readily. And that is why the brain (it is the brain, and not the people themselves) refuses unconsciously to be acted upon by new ideas. It resists. The Prana is trying to make new channels, and the brain will not allow it. This is the secret of conservatism. — Swami Vivekananda

In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive "result" (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody's "theory" of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one's current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let's not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let's recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues. — Daniel Dennett

None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the state props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner's flag are hoisted on it. — Ernst Junger

I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative party because it is the party of nonpolitics, of resistance to politics. I have seen how many of the evils of life - failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate - are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous. — Kingsley Amis

A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism. — Lord Acton

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. — Clinton Rossiter

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. — Immortal Technique

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 August Von Hayek

He was the rarest of things, a Republican with sex appeal. — David Halberstam

Most of us are not really so arrogant as to think we have a right to remold the world in our image. The best we can do, toward redeeming the states of Europe and Asia from the menace of revolution and the distresses of our time, is to realize our own conservative character, suspicious of doctrinaire alteration, respectful toward history, preferring variety over uniformity, acknowledging a moral order composed of human persons, not of mere political and economic atoms subservient to the state. We have not been appointed the correctors of mankind; but, under God, we may be an example to mankind. — Russell Kirk

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

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.

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

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. — Alexander Herzen

The conservative does not defend the Old Regime; he speaks on behalf of old regimes - in the family, the factory, the field. There, ordinary men, and sometimes women, get to play the part of little lords and ladies, supervising their underlings as if they all belong to a feudal estate . . . The task of this type of conservatism---democratic feudalism - -becomes clear: surround these old regimes with fences and gates, protect them from meddlesome intruders like the state or a social movement, while descanting on mobility and innovation, freedom and the future. — Corey Robin

A form of conservatism that makes clear we have problems in this country, it's not just about individualism, we have to help people who feel they're being failed by the system. — Damian Green

Conservatism must be based on allowing everyone to become an owner - equity for everyman. — John Redwood

Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make. — Michelle Malkin

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. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar ... Innovation is bad form. — Thorstein Veblen

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism. — Brian Eno

[T]he degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system ... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems. — Jerry Fodor

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.

When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it. — Mark Twain

The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards - to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state. — Nikolai Berdyaev

Compassionate conservatism [is] most importantly, making sure that government is not the answer to people's problems. — George W. Bush

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

The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism. — Tony Blair

If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity. — Tom Peters

Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also? — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

In the end, the difference between Conservatism and Liberalism seems to be this: the Conservative thinks of liberty as something to be preserved, the Liberal thinks of it as something to be enlarged. — Clinton Rossiter

A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic; reformism is basically optimistic. — Gough Whitlam

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

The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests. — Russell Kirk

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. — Daisaku Ikeda

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

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 dangerous 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 encounters with 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. — Jon Krakauer

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. — Barry Goldwater

If we conservatives "of color" refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of "selling out. — Michelle Malkin

All I do is convert liberals to conservatism. That's what I do, and that's why they don't like me. — Rush Limbaugh