quotations about liberals
Liberals are the greatest proponents of reason.
BILL BRANYON
Liberating Liberals
But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.
BIBLE
Isaiah 32:8
The Liberals are the flying saucers of politics. No one can make head nor tail of them and they never are seen twice in the same place.
JOHN G. DIEFENBAKER
speech, May 5, 1962
In a column a few weeks ago, I offered "a confession of liberal intolerance," criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses -- except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians. As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don't look like us, as long as they think like us. It's rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
"The Liberal Blind Spot", New York Times, May 28, 2016
A liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realize its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats.
ISAIAH BERLIN
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Have We Reached the End of History?
I think it's one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million can be made into a productive citizen. I'm realist enough to believe this can't be. We're always going to have our prisons, we're always going to have our places of preventative detention for psychopaths, and we're always going to have a certain number of people in our community who have no desire to achieve or who have no desire to even fit in an amicable way with the rest of society. And these people should be separated from the community, not in a callous way but they should be separated as far as any idea that their opinions shall have any effect on the course we follow.
SPIRO AGNEW
The Washington Post, Jul. 2, 1970
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
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
MORT SAHL
attributed, Moments of Clarity
The word liberal has been employed as the political equivalent of an untreatable but potentially containable social disease -- the kind that could be contracted merely by going to a foreign movie or ordering a decaf latte, or worse, a glass of French wine.
ERIC ALTERMAN
Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America
The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.
RONALD REAGAN
televised speech, Oct. 27, 1964
The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things -- war and hunger and date rape -- liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
P.J. O'ROURKE
Give War a Chance
Historically, liberalism is the political philosophy of individual liberty. It proclaims and insists that the individual is to be free to think, speak, and write as he wishes; to believe and worship as he wishes; and to peacefully live his life as he wishes.
RICHARD EBELING
"The Keys to Human Prosperity: Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law", Heartland Institute, June 1, 2016
I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.
DAVID MAMET
The Secret Knowledge
The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building.
BENITO MUSSOLINI
speech in Milan, Italy, Oct. 6, 1922
Liberalism demands acceptance of our human differences and the ability to mediate them through democratic institutions. It demands acceptance of multiple, perhaps incompatible truths.
ROGER COHEN
"The Death of Liberalism", New York Times, April 24, 2016
Liberals are not only liberating ourselves, but are dragging along, kicking and screaming, conservatives. Colin Powell was Bush II's first Secretary of State thanks in great part to liberal ideas on race. Sarah Palin was transformed from hockey Mom to VP phenom mainly because of liberal's liberating women. Liberals perform the experiments. Conservatives jump on board after the good results become so obvious that it's impossible not to.
BILL BRANYON
Liberating Liberals
Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy.
SPIRO AGNEW
speech in Springfield, Illinois, Sep. 10, 1970
Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.
MAO ZEDONG
"Combat Liberalism", Sep. 7, 1937
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
Characteristically American