Quotes About Liberalism

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends—democratization and illiberalism—are directly related.

That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China's expansionism but America's abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation.

We whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputationsrather than recognize or change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.

All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.

Whoever lives in Berlin note, and doesn't die of Liberalism, will never die of vexation!

Most blacks want school vouchers, but most liberals vehemently oppose them. Why? Because what is good for teachers' unions is of more importance to the Left than what is good for blacks. Who, then, is racist? By their own admission, and by the policies they pursue, the answer is the people who call themselves progressive.

What I would like to build is a new centre, a wider, broader centre, which would encompass a lot of different philosophies - you know, the philosophy that I'm putting forward that is a market liberal philosophy and a socially liberal philosophy but would have room in it for a broader church than that.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.

For the average American, the message is clear. Liberalism is no longer the answer. It is the problem.

Steven Pinker dristar sig till och med till att hävda att högre intelligens leder till mer klassiskt liberala attityder, som individualism och frihet framför tradition, auktoritet och kollektivism.

Liberalism is part of a religious disorder that demands a belief that life is controllable.

The Freudian paradigm is so intertwined with liberalism and humanism and America that to doubt the former is to implicitly denigrate the latter.

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not.

The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant.

The functional defect of socialism is that it is not social. It has not helped the poor man by eradicating the prince; it has only made the prince poor. If it has not put a chicken in every pot, it has removed the peacock from every lawn. It has made liberality a casualty of an artifact called liberalism. Such may satisfy the motive of envy; it is irrelevant to the motive of charity, and in the collectivist bosom it engenders the very greed it scorned.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism - actually a wild form of liberalism - for conservatism.

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance.

What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.

Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a "Grand March" toward Progress: "The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as

The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors (aka SJWs), who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.

Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.