Quotes About Liberalism

Earlier, I cited Oswald Spengler's chilling century-old prophecy that "the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them." This is the real danger posed by Putin: that he will be a model for other national leaders who want to retain their grip on power indefinitely, despite political and legal constraints.

The left-right political dichotomy serves liberalism by not challenging it. Democracy sustains the status quo by offering the illusion of choice with no choice. Genuine opposition can only emerge if there is an alternative story with which to counter the current mythos.

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion... for liberalism is not so much a party creed as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness... & ... Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative. –

Indeed, Brand's thinking has evolved in many ways—from anti- to pronuclear, from environmentalism to conservationism, and from libertarianism to something closer to traditional liberalism.

Children become more liberal partly as a reaction to their parents and partly through education. Education tends to make people a bit softer.

Don't you just hate it when the war on terrorism interferes with political correctness and liberalism's equality fetish?

I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending—if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.

Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.

Identity liberalism has ceased being a political project and has morphed into an evangelical one. The difference is this: evangelism is about speaking truth to power. Politics is about seizing power to defend the truth.

A citizen, simply by virtue of being a citizen, is one of us. We have stood together to defend the country against foreign adversaries in the past. Now we must stand together at home to make sure that none of us faces the risk of being left behind. We're all Americans and we owe that to each other. That's what liberalism means.

Liberal political education now takes place, if it takes place at all, on campuses that are largely detached socially and geographically from the rest of the country -- and in particular from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the Democratic Party. This is not likely to change. Which means that liberalism's prospects will depend in no small measure on what happens in our institutes of higher education.

The paradox of identity liberalism is that it paralyzes the capacity to think and act in a way that would actually accomplish the things it professes to want.

But in a democracy the only way to meaningfully defend them—and not just make empty gestures of recognition and "celebration"—is to win elections and exercise power in the long run, at every level of government. And the only way to accomplish that is to have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls them together. Identity liberalism does just the opposite.

The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home or in the office

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics.

Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything it encompassed.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

there are other dangers to conservatism and to the civilization conservatives are defending than the liberal Establishment, and that to fight liberalism without guarding against these dangers runs the risk of ending in a situation as bad as or worse than our present one.

What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.

We are not accusing liberalism of being a system of violence; we reproach it with not seeing its own face in violence, with veiling the pact upon which it rests while rejecting as barbarous that other source of freedom—revolutionary freedom which is the origin of all social pacts.