Quotes About Conservatism

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science - that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

England's dominant schools, universities, professions and enterprises are largely in the ideological and filial grip of the Conservative party. This isn't always obvious but it is emphatic, especially when they are threatened.

Everyone on the Left has a favorite story that allows them to kind of excuse Reagan, explain away Reagan, say he was dumb, but unless we reckon with that kind of emotional intelligence and his ability to kind of speak to the aspirations of the American people, the less liberals are going to be able to understand the soul of his appeal.

Women should remain at home, sit still, and bear children.

Conservative feminism is such an artificial term that doesn't mean much to me. For me conservatism means accepting reality. I acknowledge that there are differences between men and women.

There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

It used to be you could just write vaguely conservative things while running a Starbucks - now, you can't.

In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo.

There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.

To be a populist conservative is to be a fatalist; to believe in a world where your side will never win; indeed, where your side almost by definition cannot win. Where even the most shattering electoral victories turn out to be hollow, and the liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken.12

David Adkins, a state senator who was raised a fundamentalist Baptist in the plains city of Salina (today he is a moderate Republican), says, "I. . . can't recall a political issue—abortion, homosexuality, any of the issues of convenience that now dominate Republican dialogue—ever being mentioned in the course of my religious training, or in the course of my faith.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Conservatism does not defend some established order of things: It accuses; it rants; it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions.

Mark Lilla evokes the feeling well in a sympathetic 1998 summary of conservative thinking. It is not that anyone thinks that incivility, promiscuity, drug use, and irresponsibility are good things. But we have become embarrassed to criticize them unless we can couch our objections in the legalistic terms of rights, the therapeutic language of self-realization, or the economic jargon of efficiency.

conservatism's populist myth.

the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.

Because traditions are like eggs—once you break one, it is impossible to put it back inside its shell.

Anybody who doesn't support the Republican nominee... is a RINO.

I'd never get elected if people in North Carolina realized how liberal I am.

In many ways, Nixon started the modern notion of 'compassionate conservatism,' which as we all know is neither 'compassionate' nor 'conservative.'

Catholicism has the clerical equivalent to a nut allergy - even a small exposure to change, and the whole thing will go into anaphylactic shock.

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

Hence, for liberals, black people are to be included and integrated into our society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be well behaved and worthy of acceptance by our way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention to subjects they profess to find repugnant

Buddhism holds that everything is in constant flux. Thus the question is whether we are to accept change passively and be swept away by it or whether we are to take the lead and create positive changes on our own initiative. While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth.