Quotes about conservatives

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

Beecher, Henry Ward on conservatives   

"Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."

Bierce, Ambrose on conservatives   

"All great peoples are conservative."

Carlyle, Thomas on conservatives   

"There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots."

Carter, Stephen on conservatives   

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

Dane, Frank on conservatives   

"The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving."

Davies, Robertson on conservatives   

"All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on conservatives   

"Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on conservatives   

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

Hubbard, Kin on conservatives   

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

Keynes, John Maynard on conservatives   

"The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained."

Lerner, Gerda on conservatives   

"What is conservatism? It is not adherence to the old and tried, but against the new and untried?"

Lincoln, Abraham on conservatives
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"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."

Lippmann, Walter on conservatives   

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives."

Mill, John Stuart on conservatives
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"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who has never learned to walk."

Roosevelt, Franklin D. on conservatives   

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

Rosenberg, Harold on conservatives   

"We hear the haunting presentiment of a dutiful middle age in the current reluctance of young people to select any option except the one they feel will impinge upon them the least."

Sheehy, Gail on conservatives   

"A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship."

Stowe, Harriet Beecher on conservatives   

"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."

Tebbit, Norman on conservatives   

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

Tennyson, Lord Alfred on conservatives   

"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will."

Twain, Mark on conservatives   

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

Twain, Mark on conservatives   

"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."

Twain, Mark on conservatives   

"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."

Unknown, Source on conservatives   

"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."

Welch, Colin on conservatives   

"All reactionaries are paper tigers."

Zedong, Mao on conservatives