The Almost Perfect State (1921)
Context: We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know any of them, far less become intimate with them.
Source: Epigrams, p. 354
Draft Constitution for Virginia (June 1776) http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffcons.asp
1770s
On the Pledge of Allegiance: Lee v. Weisman (1992) (dissenting).
1990s
Roosevelt here slightly misquotes Thomas Babington Macaulay, who in a speech on parliamentary reform (2 March 1831) asserted: "The voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve."
1930s, Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, New York (1936)
Context: The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.
Never has a Nation made greater strides in the safeguarding of democracy than we have made during the past three years. Wise and prudent men — intelligent conservatives — have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time. In the words of the great essayist, "The voice of great events is proclaiming to us. Reform if you would preserve." I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.
Speech to Working Men of Dundee July 14, 1875 Evoking Burn’s A Man’s A Man For A’ That - Speeches of Alexander Mackenzie during his recent visit...page 44
“His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.”
"Ministers of Grace"
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)
Quoted in "Behind the Iron Curtain" - by George Moorad - Soviet Union - 1946
Speech in Rochdale (26 June 1861), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 437.
1860s
General, The Insulted and the Injured (1861)
letter to the German rulers (1524), as quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896
