Quotes About Liberals

People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it's a dangerous waste of time because they're both right.

In the United States the rise of an extreme and highly ideological Right was driven by an unrelenting assault on liberals, portraying them as both "hating America" and hostile to business

The Liberals are the flying saucers of politics. No one can make head nor tail of them and they never are seen twice in the same place.

The U.S. president's consent to the Versailles Treaty did more to damage his reputation among his fellow liberals than anything else he did that crucial year. It also sowed the seeds for a bitterness among Germans that would ripen into the political movement that led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

Resignation, "passive self-perfecting," and "etherealization": these were the components for the new Western self-image. At the same time that modern liberals embraced the goals and assumptions of welfare state New Liberalism, they gave up their self-confident, competitive edge. Toynbee's father-in-law, Gilbert Murray, coined a term for this: "failure of nerve.

You who call yourselves liberals must understand that it is your way of life that is under threat. Withdraw my right to speak freely, and you jeopardize your own in the future. Ally yourselves with the Islamists at your peril. Tolerate their intolerance at your peril.

At the same time, we need to stand up for our own principles as liberals. Specifically, we need to say to offended Western Muslims (and their liberal supporters) that it is not we who must accommodate their beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech.

American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam.

The shameful thing is that this campaign is effective in the West. Western liberals now seem to collude against critical thought and debate. I never cease to be amazed by the fact that non-Muslims who consider themselves liberals—including feminists and advocates of gay rights—are so readily persuaded by these crass means to take the Islamists' side against Muslim and non-Muslim critics.

Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way-- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it's merely their guess.

Liberals believe they own the franchise on minorities and can't stand any Hispanic or black who breaks rank.

I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it's exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.

Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves 'The Real New Deal Democrats' forever.

While many liberals have dismissed the idea of political correctness as a right-wing manufactured hysteria, it is in fact a real thing.

What liberals must conserve is the middle class: the stable family who can afford to enjoy music and theater and take the kids to Europe someday and put money in the collection plate and save for college and keep up the home and be secure against catastrophe. This family has taken big hits in payroll taxes and loss of buying power and a certain suppressed panic about job security.

Liberals are willing to believe that these robber barons will fix prices, rig markets, establish monopolies, buy politicians, exploit employees and fire them the day before they are eligible for pensions, but they absolutely will not believe that these same men would want to rule the world or would use Communism as the striking edge of their conspiracy. When one discusses the machinations of these men, Liberals usually respond by saying, But don't you think they mean well?

The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.

As a consequence, it should be true that if you just get the facts out to people, they will reason to the right conclusion. And so year after year, decade after decade, liberals keep telling facts to conservative audiences without changing many minds. This behavior by liberals is itself a form of science denial—the denial of the cognitive and brain sciences. It is simply irrational behavior by many people proud of their rationality. It

To get a sense of how equality is contested in politics, consider the constant struggle between liberals and conservatives over what equality means: equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Conservatives

That makes the federal government a thief. Hence, a common conservative attitude toward the government: You can't trust it, since, like a thief, it's always trying to find ways to take your money. Liberals

What is punishment and theft to conservatives is civic duty and fairness to liberals. There

At the heart of conservatism is strict father morality, as we have seen. But strict father morality has complexities and natural variations. What liberals don't see is that the diversity

But to liberals, who have their own very different moral system, conservative policies are so immoral that any conservative discussion of morality is taken as demagoguery. Of