Quotes About Conservatism

True small-c conservatives should fight at every turn to preserve basic standards of conduct and institutions that have served our nation well.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

The Conservative Party mustn't sound like the old man on the park bench who says things were better in 1985, or 1955, or 1855.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

Newt Gingrich wants to repeal child labor laws. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man that we need to lead us into the 18th century.

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

Queen Mary, too, remained faithful to the pre-First World War opulence approved of by her husband. Whatever else might change, one could always be sure of Queen Mary's toques, ankle-length skirts, lace parasols and long, pointed shoes.

It is absurd and a detestable shame, that we should suffer those traditions to be changed which we have received from the fathers of old.

Netanyahu is beholden to the extreme Right.

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.

The people who call themselves conservatives say, 'We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That's how we preserve family values.' The internal contradictions are amazing.

The Republican Party today has a catechism. If you want to be a candidate, with very rare exceptions, you have to repeat the catechism in lockstep uniformity: global warming isn't happening, no taxes on the rich. There are about ten things that you have to repeat, whether you believe them or not. Anybody who departs from them is in trouble.

He is of what is called the old school — a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young — and wears knee-breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings.

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.

Conservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.

The Christian Right is neither.

Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades... It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy.

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

conservative because "he accepted the need of dealing with things as they were, not as he would have wished them to be."2

You know you're a Puritan when you feel that even the Bible needs to be cleaned up.