Non Liberal Quotes & Sayings

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.' — Mason Cooley

A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance. — David Mamet

A real gold standard is thoroughly consistent with [classical] liberal principles and I, for one, am entirely in favor of measures promoting its development. — Milton Friedman

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind. — William Odom

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
... The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. — Henry David Thoreau

American author Mark Twain, while viewed as liberal and non-judgmental, did at times demonstrate both these characteristics. While his reasons for detesting the Christian faith are unclear, they seem to have been profound and deep-rooted. Having lambasted the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, in a later quote he referred to the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." — Christopher Hitchens

The place to find the explanation for the liberal-activist mindset of the courts is in the political arena. — Stockwell Day

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

Liberal Catholics are the worst enemies of the Church. — Pope Pius IX

FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal. — Noah Feldman

One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. — William F. Buckley Jr.

I'd breed a little liberal army in the wood, just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar with their tribe of mutant inbred piglets. — Lou Reed

I made a commitment ... both to myself and to some supporters to carefully consider a run for the Liberal leadership for the Liberal Party of Canada. — Dalton McGuinty

(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side. — Eric Hobsbawm

News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center. — Walter Cronkite

When we introduce new technologies into our classrooms we are teaching our students twice. — Michael Joseph Brown

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. — Lionel Trilling

It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. — Pankaj Mishra

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a "person"; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions. — Judith Butler

What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy. — Andrew Sullivan

If the Christian church is to move responsibly towards the future, it must restore or renew its ties with its past. Contemporary Catholic and Protestant radicals want to claim that Christianity means whatever "Christian" today happen to believe and practice, be it pantheism, unitarianism, or sodomy. The Christian faith has suffered immeasurable harm because of the tendency of people to use the word "Christian" in a careless and non-historical way. Nothing in this argument would preclude liberal Protestants and Catholics from developing and practicing any religion they like. — Ronald H. Nash

The notion of a healthy society, of capable people who are able to enjoy life, arose in the liberal, middle-class, leftist and non-religious segments of society. The euthanasia idea came from neither the radical right-wing nor the conservative corner. It was and remains part of the modern age and progressive thought. — Gotz Aly

Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31 — Thomas Merton

MEMRI allows an audience far beyond the Arabic-speaking world to observe the wide variety of Arab voices speaking through the media, schoolbooks, and pulpits to their own people. What one hears is often astonishing, sometimes frightening, and always important. Most importantly, it includes the newly-emerging liberal voices of reform and hope, as well as disturbing echoes of ancient hatreds. Without the valuable research of MEMRI, the non-Arabic speaking world would not have this indispensable window. — Richard Holbrooke

Eunice had deposited St John upon the balcony of the first-floor apartment of former Liberal MP, The Rt. Hon. Leonard Cossins, the disgraced Lord Mayor of Mitchell-Baines who had been removed from office having been caught administering counterfeit buttercup syrup to the local yeomanry whilst on a hunting trip to Stoke-Poges. — St John Morris

Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. — Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving. — Francis Fukuyama

Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life. — Michael Sandel

Only liberal organizations are clearly designated [in the press] as "nonpatisan, nonprofit." Non-liberal research organizations are always identified as "right-wing" or "conservative." — Irving Kristol

As chapters 5 and 6 will discuss in detail, the identification of liberal democracies with tolerance and of nonliberal regimes with fundamentalism discursively articulates the global moral superiority of the West and legitimates Western violence toward the non-West. That is, the exclusive identification of the West with tolerance, and of tolerance with civilization, makes the West into the broker of the civilized, delimiting what is "intolerable" and therefore legitimate for imperial conquest cloaked as liberation. — Wendy Brown

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

A church must be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional liberal churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional fundamentalist churches. This kind of church is profoundly counter-intuitive to American observers. It breaks their ability to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian west. — Timothy Keller

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

I do not like to call myself a Liberal, because there is so much that is wrong with liberalism. I also do not like to call my a Conservative for exactly the same reason. The fact that the theater of conservativism today seems to be such a haven for such an abundance of small minded, non-thinking, irrationalists is however making it very difficult for me to not adopt a harder stance. — Derek R. Audette

I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is that when you're reading their decision, their opinion, you can't tell if it's written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you're reading a good judicial decision. — John F. Kerry

Judges pretty much act independently once they get on the bench so I'm not really sure why Harper's concerned that the court is currently being stacked with a lot of Liberal appointments. — Alan Young

Unfortunately, the case for equal opportunities, long established in
liberal Western society, cuts no ice in the fundamentalist regime if
the five-year old. There is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is her
prophet. — Allison Pearson

Senator Brown and I have different philosophies as represented in our different ratings: I am a conservative, and he is a liberal. — Rob Portman

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them. — Virginia Woolf

Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed ... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment. — Norman Dorsen

Perceptions of black criminality aren't likely to change until black behavior changes. Rather than address that challenge, however, too many liberal policy makers change the subject. Instead of talking about black behavior, they want to talk about racism or poverty or unemployment or gun control. — Jason L. Riley

The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporfic to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites. — Steven Biko

The anything-goes passiveness of the religious and political Left is matched by the preachy moralism of the religious and political Right. The person who uncritically embraces any party line is guilty of an idolatrous surrender of her core identity as Abba's Child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses our ragged human dignity. — Brennan Manning

The old liberal rebelled against taxation without responsibility, the new liberal wants the taxation as a handout without responsibility. — Fulton J. Sheen

The radical rightwing pegs Hollywood as a leftist town, which is completely wrong. There are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who talk a liberal agenda ... but all the studio bosses, for as long as there have been studios, have all been as far rightwing as you can possibly imagine. — Paul Haggis

There is nothing wrong with being a declared liberal or conservative and conducting a sympathetic interview with a political figure who shares your views. — Peggy Noonan

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging. — Jane Smiley

Change was a constant in Walt Disney's commitment to tell a story well, to bring it to an audience through the technology of the day, and to push that technology so that rather than controlling the story, it enhanced the story and gave it an opportunity to touch people, to speak to each of them individually, to make it believable. — Newton Lee

I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges. — Taslima Nasrin

In defiance of all the tortue, of all the might, of all the malice of the world, the liberal man will ever be rich; for God's providence is his estate, God's wisdom and power are his defence, God's love and favor are his reward, and God's word is his security. — Isaac Barrow

When conservative judges strike down laws, it's because of what's in the Constitution. When liberal judges strike down laws (or impose new laws), it's because of what's in the New York Times — Ann Coulter

According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires-it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self. — Robert P. George

What I would like to vote for is a candidate that is socially liberal, a fiscal conservative, broadly libertarian with a small 'l' but sensible and pragmatic and with a chance of winning. That's more or less the empty set. — Tyler Cowen

The Liberals, apparently, want to prorogue the House. They want to run out of town, get out of town just one step ahead of the sheriff. Is the Liberal government committed to staying here as planned throughout the month of November so that it can be held accountable in the House for its actions? ... Now is it true that the government will prorogue the House so that it will not be held accountable for its shameful record — Stephen Harper

I believe you [Donald Trump] know politicians better than I do because for 40 years you've been funding liberal Democratic politicians. — Ted Cruz

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. — Henry Doss

If you know your Bible and your Shakespeare and can shoot craps, you have a liberal education. — Tallulah Bankhead

I prefer music but sometimes if there's on talk radio - someone might be on that I like. I listen to the old - to "Air America," down at the - liberal talk shows and things like that I find kind of nice, their criticizing the conservatives. I find that quite relaxing, entertaining, but music, a lot of music. — Robert Barry

The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie
but only if she is paid the minimum wage. — Irving Kristol

The combination of the Liberal and Labour Parties is much stronger than the Liberal Party would be if there were no third Party in existence. Many men who would in that case have voted for us voted on this occasion as the Labour Party told them i.e. for the Liberals. The Labour Party has "come to stay" ... the existence of the third Party deprives us of the full benefits of the 'swing of the pendulum', introduces a new element into politics and confronts us with a new difficulty. — Austen Chamberlain

To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree. — Peter Gay

No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one. — George Seldes

Conservatives were griping for decades about liberal media and nobody paid attention. Now, all of a sudden, one news channel has gotten a whole new community of people freaked out. — Michael K. Powell

I wish more people knew that the only one of the three main parties where not a single MP flipped from one property to the next, and not a single MP avoided capital-gains tax, where every single London MP did not claim a penny of second-home allowance, was the Liberal Democrats. — Nick Clegg

Don't liberal Democrats ever learn economic principles, or does their class warfare trump all else? — Cal Thomas

McCarthy generally, as an individual, was a liberal. He was, in economic philosophy and a lot of other things, extremeyl liberal. — Roy Cohn