Quotes About Conservatism

I don't go looking for new fads.

Some people insist that hallowed professional teams should never change their nicknames.

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.

I don't consider myself to be a Pete King Republican or a Ted Cruz Republican or a John Boehner Republican, or a Tea Party Republican.

Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is... Paul Ryan.

I have personally seen Ted Cruz stand up and fight on the issues that matter the most to conservatives, even when it wasn't popular in Congress.

He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.

Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative.

Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past.

Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power

The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have

Conservatism as we know it today is a distinctively modern outlook, shaped by the Enlightenment and by the emergence of societies in which the 'we' of social membership is balanced at every point against the 'I' of individual ambition.

The ease with which large producers can transfer their costs is the glaring abuse through which the market – otherwise one of the core values of conservatism – condemns itself.

In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism – not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the nineteenth century socialists.

the growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people think of conservatism merely as a form of complacency towards the current system of material rewards, which has nothing whatever to say about the things that 'money can't buy', or about the effect of the consumer society on our deeper values. Yet

Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.

To offer toleration to those gripped by animosity to your way of life is to open the door to destruction. An elaborate lit review, more the history of conservatism.

Conservatism, as I understand it, means the maintenance of the social ecology. Individual freedom is certainly a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the sole or the true goal of politics. Conservatism involves the conservation of our shared resources – social, material, economic and spiritual – and resistance to social entropy in all its forms.

He was also wary of upsetting the existing social hierarchy.

that favored stability over innovation, predictability over experimentation

Republicans seems to me to be chiefly concerned with holding on to what they have: in society, it's position, or respectability, or what you will; in business, of course, it's profit.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions.

There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.

Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.