Quotes on Conservatism

Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.

Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

The great decisions of government cannot be dictated by the concerns of religious factions. We have succeeded for 205 years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't stop now. To retreat from that separation would violate the principles of conservatism and the values upon which the framers built this democratic republic.

It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking.

Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.

While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth.