Good Liberalism Quotes & Sayings

We attribute the problems of our children to liberalism, conservatism, godlessness, godfulness, evolutionism, creationism-anything that seems to make sense, except the quiet notion that contemporary parenting is a complex set of learned skills, many of which seem counterintuitive to us. It's not religion and it sure ain't politics. And it can be learned from good and bad sources, so we must constantly question and upgrade our learning. — Michael J. Bradley

The problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked - Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts. — Henry Adams

Many millennials...feel "unsafe" if someone they disagree with speaks at an event they don't have to attend on their campus....they're trying to figure out what gender they are and which bathroom they should be using. It's not an improvement....Snowflakes may melt when the going gets tough, but kids who are taught good, conservative values will stand tall even when it's not easy. — John Hawkins

It is illogical to say, as many etatists do, that liberalism is hostile to or hates the state, because it is opposed to the transfer of the ownership of railroads or cotton mills to the state. If a man says that sulphuric acid does not make a good hand lotion, he is not expressing hostility to sulphuric acid as such; he is simply giving his opinion concerning the limitations of its use. — Ludwig Von Mises

He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own. — Morris L. West

I explain how America hatred and Jew hatred are [INDEMIC] to Modern Liberalism and delve deeper into why it is the otherwise good and decent people will INVARIABLY side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. — Evan Sayet

What does it say about a president's policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record? What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us, time and again? — Mitt Romney

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character. — George Will

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. — John Rawls

The good news is that a vast majority of Indians from different religions see no contradiction between religiosity and liberalism, keep India stable. We religious liberals don't talk loudly enough. — Amish Tripathi

Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability. — Morris Raphael Cohen

If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men. — Ludwig Von Mises

My last penny! I think I'll squander it on myself. I never feel badly about spending money my dad has earned honestly! I can't decide whether I should buy a balloon or a gumball. A gumball would taste mighty good, but a balloon would be a lot more fun ... I'll take a balloon! Sooner or later in life a person has to learn to make decisions! (Sees someone with a different color balloon) Gee, I wish I'd bought a RED balloon. — Charles M. Schulz

Republicans should save the clip of Jonathan Gruber and run it over and over again in the run-up to the 2016 election. This attitude that government is better at making decisions than you are because you are too stupid to know what is good for you is a hallmark of patronizing, arrogant and condescending liberalism. — Cal Thomas

As a reformer the liberal is dissatisfied with things as they are because they violate his exceptionally tender conscience ... Liberalism does not advocate change for its own sake, but for the sake of something better in the direction of what he regards as good, namely, the maximum of liberty consistent with a regard for all men and all interests
the general happiness based on peace and justice. — Ralph Barton Perry

I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause - but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journalism.
[Interview with Ron Powers (Chicago Sun Times) for Playboy, 1973] — Walter Cronkite

Never will we be able to understand our times if we naively 'think' of this system of self Government as the work of a few gangsters or the creation of a pack of criminals we call a political party. The appeal of Socialism, Fascism and communism was principally negative; they were protests against a live and let live anything goes liberalism, a spineless indifference to causes, a failure to recognize that nothing was evil enough to hate, and nothing was good enough to die for. — Fulton J. Sheen

Liberty isn't liberalism, arbitrariness, but it's connected; it's conditioned by the great values of love and solidarity and in general by the good. — Pope Benedict XVI

There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment. — Roland Barthes

[T]he commitment to a framework neutral among ends can be seen as a kind of value [ ... ] but its value consists precisely in its refusal to affirm a preferred way of life or conception of the good. — Michael J. Sandel

Alongside the success of much Church marketing, and in the midst of much of the psychologized faith in the evangelical world today, a profound secularization of faith has taken place, and this despite the continued use of good biblical words like sin, grace, Christ, and atonement. This secularization is appealing because it buys the appearance of success, but it also forfeits the nature of biblical faith. The seeds of a full-blown liberalism have now been sown, and in the next generation they will surely come to maturity. — David F. Wells

If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism. — Marc Maron

Justice demands that the good and hard-working be rewarded and the evil and the lazy be punished (if only by the withholding of the rewards of doing the right things). Modern Liberalism demands that the good and hardworking be punished as the recipients of an unfair advantage and the evil and the lazy be rewarded, their acts of evil and their failure all the proof the Modern Liberal needs that somehow they have been victimized by forces out of their control. — Evan Sayet

My analysis is that most faith based systems depend upon an absolute moral order. The declaration of things as absolutely evil or absolutely good, as sin or virtue, puts liberalism into a horrible position because it's founded on no judgment on anything. As a result, any faith that is seriously practiced or understood is a challenge to the politics that depend on constituencies that would rather not be told that their choices are bad and their lives are not virtuous. — Hugh Hewitt

Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful 'expert' that we ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as possible alternatives. Don't these good people realize that they are reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity? — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others. — Michael J. Sandel

An essential feature of a decent society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of outcome - not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state ... These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the core of classical liberalism, of Enlightenment thinking ... Like Aristotle, [Adam] Smith understood that the common good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues. — Noam Chomsky

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it. — Hunter S. Thompson

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions. — Joseph Epstein

The Left has failed to understand the extent to which its intolerant, often coercive, approach to issues that permit good-willed disagreement has turned off voters who might otherwise be sympathetic to their general program. — Ian Tuttle

Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism. — Langston Hughes