Quotes About Conservatism

Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.

I was interested in the ideas - freedom, free speech and having control of my own life. That's why I became a Tory.

There's a track called 'Why Not Nothing' about how the world's turning so conservative and so religious at the same time. I think it's up to the songwriters to give another side to the coin, and my music does that.

TV isn't a wide medium when it comes to boldness on the small screen because of the audience. It reaches out to the audience but keeping the traditions intact.

The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors.

Conservatism vests in and depends on the widespread, informed understanding of human nature, self-governance and the First Principle of Progress: free people interacting in free markets produce the greatest good for the greatest number always, but only, when tethered to virtue and morality.

When you see John Boehner crying, believe you me, it's because he cannot control, uh, that wild contingency called the Tea Party.

I've always been kind of a play-by-the-rules girl; I tend to like things structured, predictable, and sometimes even a little boring.

I know that with most companies that have a lot of success, it tends to throw you off, and you can become more conservative. One of our questions is, How do we keep from being pulled into conservatism because we're afraid of not being successful again?

I believe the GOP should pitch its big-top tent around fiscal conservatism and a muscular foreign policy rather than carnival bark outside the sideshow tents of gay marriage and reproductive choice.

Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their "mobilizing passions," and try to co-opt the fascist following.

Tea Party, far from representing a new strain of libertarian populism, was in fact another revival of White Christian America.

He had never expected or wished to be allowed to enjoy such things; he had always been of opinion that they were never intended for the likes of him. He called himself a Conservative and was very patriotic.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

Libertarians (like anarchists and Marxists) generally believe that human nature is good, though damaged by certain social institutions. Conservatives, on the contrary, hold that in Adam's fall we sinned all: human nature, though compounded of both good and evil, is irremediably flawed; so the perfection of society is impossible, all human beings being imperfect.

In a revolutionary epoch, sometimes men taste every novelty, sicken of them all, and return to ancient principles so long disused that they seem refreshingly hearty when they are rediscovered.

What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time

Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions.