Quotes About Liberalism

The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.

Well-intentioned liberalism always leads to progressivism. There's no choice there. Once that action is taken the only thing you can run on is totalitarianism - you have no choice.

I'm a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.

Liberalism, above all, means emancipation - emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty.

Because liberalism typically doesn't sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists.

Unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default. You have to think your way out of liberalism.

I would never tell anyone who to vote for. I'm a different kind of 'liberal' and I think people should be true to themselves. If you're Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, you should be true to yourself and be who you are.

Well, in the past, the size of government was one of the more fundamental dividing lines between Right and Left. The Right was supposed to represent the small government philosophy - limited spending, low taxes. Obviously, things have shifted.

There is a liberal fascism that is dedicated to going after believing Christians who follow the biblical teaching on marriage.

These differing emphases explain a lot—for example, the classical liberal view is that everyone has equal rights to happiness; rightists instead discount fairness in favor of expedient authority, generating the classical conservative view that some socioeconomic inequality is a tolerable price for things running smoothly.

Lewes and Eliot between them, someone has said, a little pretentiously but not wrongly, defined the liberalism of the oikos, the Greek word for home, whereas Trollope's is the liberalism of the polis, the city. Lewes and Eliot were more prescient of our own preoccupations: reform had to pass through the living room before it could move to Parliament.

I mean, what happened to developing the individual, to encouraging subversion and independence? I thought that's what this place was all about. Instead, it's, you know, just the old bourgeois concept of togetherness–i.e., conformity–under the guise of PC liberalism. It's fucking oppressive, man. It's downright totalitarian.

There were light moments in response to hecklers. 'What would be the consequence if this seat were lost to Liberalism and to Free Trade?' he asked his audience rhetorically. When someone shouted out 'Beer!', Churchill immediately replied, 'That might be the cause. I am talking of the consequence.

Politics is partially about what you fear more than what you love, so there are plenty of things about liberalism all by itself that make me tempted to support Trump.

It doesn't benefit me to lie to people. They're eventually going to find out the truth, and then where am I? That's the problem with liberalism and socialism, by the way: it has to be propped up by lies.

Liberalism is financed by the dividends from Conservatism.

liberalism and democracy, with all of their limitations, are what remains after every utopia and extremist scheme based on blood and territory has been exposed and shattered by reality.

The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses.

The defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification).

The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests that we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism.

History had not led to the triumph of liberalism; it had led to Hitler and Stalin.

Authoritarianism] appeals to core elements of human nature that liberalism does not always satisfy—the desire for order, for strong leadership, and perhaps above all, the yearning for the security of family, tribe, and nation.

The question is not what will bring down the liberal order but what can possibly hold it up? If the liberal order is like a garden, artificial and forever threatened by the forces of nature, preserving it requires a persistent, unending struggle against the vines and weeds that are constantly working to undermine

THERE WAS NOTHING INEVITABLE about this turn of events. No divine providence or progressive teleology, no unfolding Hegelian dialectic required that liberalism triumph after World War II.