Quotes About Conservatism

My God, the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was.

Well, I'm a libertarian conservative, so I believe in limited government/maximum individual freedom.

A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic, reformism is basically optimistic.

I think Churchill would be appalled at the Thatcher government.

Conservatism has always been about reforming government and solving problems, and that's why the conservative movement should lead on immigration reform.

The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom...

Government is the enemy of conservatism and freedom.

Now that Ronald Reagan's place in history is secure, liberals are trying to remake him. A pernicious myth is that Reagan and Tip O'Neill were great friends.

Conservative ideas are alive and dynamic, the result of a free and intellectually honest vision for the country. As long as conservatism is strong, the future of a strong America is assured.

There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values.

Please assure me that you are all Republicans.

That is the crux of modern conservatism - government taking strong measures to foster the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence.

We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one; it is established, and it is understood.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the new people whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to

After all, there was good in the old ways.

I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils,—a blind and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform.

You don't mean what you say. You may think you do, but you don't. What has been right and natural, since the days of Eve, will keep on being right and natural to the end of the chapter. What has gone on for six thousand years is not likely to stop short and change itself, in a single quarter century. Nothing in nature has ever done that.

This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Be not the first by whom the new are tired, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

If Conservatism may, in a non-party sense, claim Shakespeare as an authority in its favor, in Milton, on the other hand, I suppose Liberalism again in a non-party sense would recognize a support.

A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.

Now make no mistake, I think we need a strong dose of fiscal conservatism in Washington, D.C.