Quotes About Liberalism

Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism.

Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.

I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50

The greater threat lies in our letting down our guard against ourselves: in high-mindedly embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion, as the Marxists did. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.

Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: 'Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.'6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.

The Union students] talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria . . . They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.

For years, the university system has brainwashed its students to believe fervently in the tenets of liberalism.

From race to the environment, from religion to sex, from the War on Terror to the Arab-Israeli conflict, universities push a never-ending line of liberal claptrap. The higher education system indoctrinates America's youth.

My objection to Liberalism is this that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind namely, politics of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.

A moment's reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but always and only a disintegrating force.

Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate excesses.

Liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.

we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and we didn't want a bad conscience.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can't fix everything, and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow.

Lest conservatives be too proud, it's worth recalling that conservatism's rise was decisively enabled by liberalism's weakness.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

Liberalism will beat totalitarianism by killing it softly, not by mimicking it.

Graças a Churchill, não foi a Alemanha que passou a dominar a Europa, mas sim os Estados Unidos e a Rússia. Graças a Churchill, o fascismo deixou de desempenhar qualquer papel significativo no mundo, ficando o liberalismo e o socialismo a travar a luta pela primazia na política interna dos países. (...) Churchill não desejava grande parte destes cenários, embora aceitasse como mal menor num contexto mais pessimista.

The new liberalism that emerged in the 1960s actually coveted responsibility for black problems—or at least the illusion of responsibility—because there was so much moral and political power in the idea of delivering blacks from their tragic past. This

Moynihan's unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.

Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.

And so modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be "progressive" and forward looking by fixing its gaze backward. It insists that America's shameful past is the best explanation of its current social problems. It looks at the present, but it sees only the past.

Through this liberalism, the government took a kind of benevolent dominion over the fate of minorities and the poor, not to genuinely help them (which would require asking from them the hard work and sacrifice that real development requires), but to achieve immunity for the government from the taint of the past.