Conservative Quotes

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who has never learned to walk.

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.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

A conservative is a fellow who thinks a rich man should have a square deal.

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

A Conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.

Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating.

Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

Take those chances and you can achieve greatness, whereas if you go conservative, you'll never know. I truly believe what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Even if you fail, learning and moving on is sometimes the best thing.

I'm conservative, but I'm not a nut about it.

All great peoples are conservative.

That man's the true Conservative who lops the moldered branch away.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates.

The radicals are the men past middle life.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that "ancient institution" the old one.

I've got money so I'm a Conservative.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

The country has become much more conservative, partly because it's been taken over by the religious right.

Let's trace the birth of an idea. It's born as rampant radicalism, then it becomes progressivism, then liberalism, then it becomes moderated conservative, outmoded, and gone.

I'm a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.

The president does not have any obligation to make a consensus appointment here.

What the president's obligation is, is to pick a judicial conservative, and I believe that's what he's gonna do.

White collar conservative flashin down the street, pointing that plastic finger at me, they all assume my kind will drop and die, but I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.

A conservative believes nothing should be done for the first time.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle.

He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory -- to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.

The word conservative is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.

A conservative sees a man drowning 50 feet from shore, throws him a 25 foot long rope, and tells him to swim to it. A liberal throws him a rope 50 feet long, then drops his end and goes off to perform another good deed.

To be conservative requires no brains whatsoever.

Cabbages, cows and conifers are conservatives, and are so stupid they don't even know it. All that is basically required is acceptance of what exists.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood -- a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics,that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order.

Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values. Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. They deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Speaking to how elections are framed in the USA: It is not Republican vs Democrat, nor Conservative vs Liberal, nor Rich vs Poor/ middle class but the true battle is average voter vs corrupt politician.

A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.