Quotes About Conservatism

The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically

They don't come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the old important ones. They want to hear what they've been told before, with only some small variation on what they've been hearing all their lives, and then they want to go home and eat pot roast and say it was a good service and feel satisfied. But

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

Conservatives should question how the death penalty actually works in order to stay true to small government, reduction in wasteful spending, and respect for human life.

Recognizing that the reasoning individual is far more likely to be carried away by some worthless passing fashion than he is to discover a new and valuable truth, they prefer to uphold ideas and behaviors that have been tested for generations and have stood their ground. And where they introduce alterations, they do so according to the method of constructive reasoning.

Dayananda's contemporary, Pope Pius IX, had much more conservative views about women, but shared Dayananda's admiration for superhuman authority. Pius led a series of reforms in Catholic dogma and established the novel principle of papal infallibility, according to which the Pope can never err in matters of faith (this seemingly medieval idea became binding Catholic dogma only in 1870, eleven years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species).

We are very puritan in America. We still hold true to these really antiquated values, this idea of the sanctity of marriage.

One suspects that the conservatives of left and right don't much like the "mass" and its badly informed preferences. Let us take care of you, they cry. Let tradition celebrated by wise elders, or planning implemented by wise experts, guide you, oh you sadly misled mass. (The ruling lords and the monopolists view the clerisy's conservative theorizing with delight, resting assured that the elders and the planners will inadvertently shield their rents.)

Schooling, by definition, must be conservative. It is naturally dependent on an older generation's level of knowledge and sense of values.

Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny

The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

The conservatism of a religion—its orthodoxy—is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. A rising religious movement is all change and experiment—open to new views and techniques from all quarters.

There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.

France as a state, with its interests and aspirations confronted (or was in alliance with) other states of the same kind, but on the other hand France as the Revolution appealed to the peoples of the world to overthrow tyranny and embrace liberty, and the forces of conservatism and reaction opposed her. No doubt after the first apocalyptic years of revolutionary war the difference between these two strands of conflict diminished

Parce qu'il y a toujours eu, dans le discours de ceux qui portent traditionnellement les idées du conservatisme, une tonalité identitaire – souvent fondée sur la religion, la nation, la terre, la civilisation, la race, ou un mélange de tout cela.

And it was Texas that turned out to be especially congenial to the development of Christian fundamentalism in America.

'National Review' and 'The Weekly Standard' are both left-wing magazines, and I want to destroy them also.

Most of all, however, critics of black conservatives say we've forgotten where we came from. I may forget a federal budget number or, God forbid, to set the alarm clock for my weekly 6 a.m. flight to Washington, but I know exactly where I came from.

So the majority of Americans are conservatives. They believe in things like the Constitution. I know that's weird to some people but they believe in it.

Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments.

In our religion, there are people who might be conservative about practicing dance after marriage, but I don't want anything or anyone to come between me and my dance.

The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.

To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.