quotations about conservatives
Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the g*****n road.
TIM KREIDER
We Learn Nothing
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Interpretation of Dreams
Liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.
E.J. DIONNE
JR., The War Against Public Life
He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for the "good old times,"--he might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Conservatives are more religious than liberals--although there is no evidence that they're nicer people because of it.
ANDY ROONEY
Common Nonsense
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
ROGER SCRUTON
"Eliot and Conservatism", A Political Philosophy
A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now.
MORT SAHL
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.
ROGER SCRUTON
Conservative Texts: An Anthology
A conservative frame of mind is very limiting for an actor, and a human being, too.
VANESSA REDGRAVE
Elle Magazine, Oct. 1989
A riddle, Madam Chairman. When is government spending not government spending? And on the other hand, when does government spending which, according to the conservatives, destroys jobs, in fact create jobs? The answer is when it's for weapons. We have, on the other side, a form of weaponized Keynesianism. When it comes to spending money to build roads or improve medical infrastructure or do other things that are enhancing the quality of life, they tell us that government spending doesn't create a job. But when we are talking about continuing to produce weapons that have the admirable purpose of defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and we're still producing the weapons, then somehow we have to keep them going because of its job creation capacity.... I am amazed that people can lament spending and forget the elephant in the room. And when the elephant forgets the elephant in the room, I suppose it's even more surprising, because it is massive military spending now and for the future that is the problem.... The budget that my friends on the other side would like commits us to spending billions of dollars to defend Prague against Iran. I'd rather protect old people against poverty.
BARNEY FRANK
congressional budget resolution for FY10, Apr. 2, 2009
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
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
The Illuminati Papers
Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.
DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN
New York Post, May 14, 1969
When Conservatives crusade against government while they are trying to be appointed to head the government, I think that's weird!
RACHEL MADDOW
The Colbert Report, Nov. 6, 2008
Conservatism is purely an ad hoc affair; its findings vary with conditions, and are good for this day and train only.
ALBERT JAY NOCK
The Atlantic Monthly, October 1936
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
Conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
Why I Am Not a Conservative
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