Quotes about conservative
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“A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Space Cadet

Source: Space Cadet (1948), Chapter 9 “Long Haul”, p. 101

Behavior, Imagination, Thinking

“To say that I did not support the candidacy of Mr. Trump is the understatement of the year. I fiercely opposed it… I have criticized as unnecessary his policy on pausing immigration from certain countries, and I have criticized as weak to the point of meaningless his executive order on religious freedom. Indeed, I characterized it as a betrayal of his promise to reverse Obama era anti-religious-liberty policies. Donald Trump is not, and usually doesn't pretend to be, a man of strict or high principles… As a pragmatist, he doesn't have a governing philosophy — he's neither a conservative nor a liberal. On one day he'll give a speech to some evangelical pastors that makes him sound like a religious conservative, but the next day he'll lavishly praise Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is waging an all-out war on those who stand up for traditional moral values in Canada.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2017, Interview with Matthew Bunson (2017)

War, Support, Freedom, Betrayal

“The Conservative Party has never believed that the business of government is the government of business.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1981/nov/10/nationalised-industries in the House of Commons (10 November 1981)

Business

“Good jobs also depend on reliable and affordable energy. This Congress must act to encourage conservation, promote technology, build infrastructure, and it must act to increase energy production at home so America is less dependent on foreign oil.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Home, Dependency

“(First Bad Girl) Conservatives say gay marriage undermines the institution of marriage....(Second Bad Girl) The minute women got driver's licenses, marriage was doomed.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 21

Women, Marriage, Girl

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

The Exploration of Space (1951), p. 111
1950s

History, Learning

“To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

The New Men of Power (1948).
1940s

War, Peace

“I do think in the media there is a tendency to describe conservatives as one of two things: stupid or evil. And those are the two categories that every conservative gets put in by Democrats and the media. A conservative is either stupid — too dumb to know the right answer — and even worse, if they actually know the right answer, then they’re evil. They want people to suffer. I suppose I feel mildly complimented in that they have recently invented a third category, which is crazy. It’s the alternative to stupid or evil. And now crazy is the third one, because it seems inconceivable that there could be Americans who believe in free-market principles and believe in the Constitution and are working to defend them.”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

Interview with Alex Altman of Time Magazine, in Alex Altman, " Why Ted Cruz Thinks the Media Gets Conservatism Wrong http://swampland.time.com/2013/08/08/why-ted-cruz-thinks-the-media-gets-conservatism-wrong/#ixzz2cnxPPCOQ", Time Magazine (August 8, 2013). 2010s

People, Stupidity, Feeling, Thinking

“Mike Huckabee: My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris: Mike Huckabee's a lifelong hunter who'll protect our Second Amendment rights.
Huckabee: There's no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard, only another fist.
Norris: Mike Huckabee wants to put the IRS out of business.
Huckabee: When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn't lifting himself up, he's pushing the Earth down.
Norris: Mike's a principled, authentic conservative.
Huckabee: Chuck Norris doesn't endorse, he tells America how it's gonna be.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Campaign ad, [2007-11-18, HuckChuckFacts, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjYv2YW6azE]

Business

“The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 64

Life, People, Truth, Education

“The only platform from which public exposures can be made is an all-Russian newspaper. "Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is inconceivable in modern Europe."In this connection Russia must undoubtedly by included in modern Europe. The press has long ago become a power in our country, otherwise the government would not spend tens of thousands of rubles to bribe it, and to subsidize the Katkovs and Meshcherskys. And it is no novelty in autocratic Russia for the underground press to break through the wall of sponsorship and compel the legal and conservative press to speak openly of it.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Country

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

"Our Mission Statement" in National Review (19 November 1955) http://www.nationalreview.com/article/223549/our-mission-statement-william-f-buckley-jr.

History, Time, Patience

“He would also advise conservatives not to be deterred if their opponents on the left unfairly called them racists — something he rightly believed happened all the time. Indeed, one of the things that got him out of bed in the morning was fighting the media-Democratic narrative that conservatives are all a bunch of racists.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Andrew Breitbart would tell Steve Bannon to stay in Europe (2018)

Time, Fight

“Conservatives have a problem with women. For that matter, all men do.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

The Cornell Review (1984), reported in Time (April 2005) and in Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter (2006) by Joe Maguire, p. 59.
1980s-90s

Women, Men, Problem

“Firstly what does conservation mean? It is not merely the saving from extinction of such species as the Notornis, the Leadbetters Possum or the Leathery Turtle; this is important work but it is only part of the problem. You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself — a point that seems to escape many people.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

Two in the Bush (1966)

Life, People, Problem, Future

“Apart from the greatness of Bizos for his role in the dismantling of apartheid, defending Mandela etc, he also manifested a genius in his role as a leading member of the conservative South African Greek community, by drawing historical parallels between the 400 years of slavery that Greece had suffered under the Ottoman Turks and the 300 years or so of repression and cruelty suffered by the Southern African black tribes and mixed race people under the British and then under the Nationalist Afrikaner rule. By using this strategy Bizos was able to balance his fight for justice in South Africa, and synchronously lead the very conservative Greek community in a more progressive direction.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On George Bizos
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

People, Justice, Communication, Suffering

“Conservative: One who admires radicals a century after they're dead.”

Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer

As quoted in The Modern Handbook of Humor (1967) by Ralph Louis Woods
Variants:
A conservative is someone who admires radicals a century after they're dead.
A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Dead

“It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, ‘Stop.’ You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2013, Detroit Ran Into The Inviolable Rule Of Economics (2013)

Law, Time

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2 2010s

Love, Death, Women, Hate

“Christian conservatives are claiming that the hit documentary March of the Penguins supports the theory of intelligent design. Meanwhile, backers of evolution claim that intelligent design is refuted in the documentary March of the Bonaduces.”

Amy Poehler (1971) American actress

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/05/05aupdate.phtml
Weekend Update samples

Intelligence, Support

“To misperceive the DPRK as a communist state – either of the Stalinist or indigenized kind – is therefore to misunderstand and miscalculate its behavior. I often encounter resistance to this point when lecturing to American audiences. Conservatives do not want communism let off the hook for creating this state, and liberals do not want Washington let off the hook for bullying it. Politically correct college students object to the attribution of racism to non-whites.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

Behavior, Communication

“What is technically called the 'fungibility' of money, is its chief value as an article of commerce; and this fact could not long remain recognized, even by such a conservative class as legal officials.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter V, The Law Of Chattels, p. 58

Money

“I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Interview with Ken Burns in the PBS documentary Baseball
2010s

Happiness

“Feudalism worked in its crude and inequitable fashion until the coming of the Industrial Age. Today the Feudal tradition and its adherents are broken as a political power and in most cases are ignobly lending their prestige and their abilities to the support of the predatory plutocracy which has gained complete control of the Conservative Party. In modern times the old regime is confronted with two alternatives. The first is to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor. The other alternative is to become flunkeys of the bourgeoisie. It is a matter of constant surprise and regret that many of my class have chosen the latter course.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Letter to The Morning Post (27 July 1928), quoted in Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Papermacs, 1981), p. 134.

Age, World, Beauty, Fashion

“If, on the other hand, the Conservative party invites the electorate to link national independence in its mind with Bennery and all things 'left' and to discern in membership of the Community a bulwark against the dangers of socialism, the implications are still more disreputable; for this is nothing other than saying that one would rather live under the tutelage of foreigners than incur the risk of one's fellow countrymen being free to make up their own minds. That would be to stamp the Conservative party as a class party with a vengeance, a slur the more damaging because there were in fact, at the time of the original debates, Conservatives inside and outside Parliament who did advocate membership on precisely that ground—blood brothers, no doubt, of those who in an earlier generation viewed the rise of Hitler with equanimity or approval as a safeguard against Communism.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Conservative Party conference at Blackpool (14 October 1981), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), p. 127
1980s

Communication, Time

“The only word I will accept on the word 'conservative', for me anyway, is 'unapologetic'. Because, I for one, am not sorry that we won the Cold War. I am not sorry that we reduced tax rates and created economic opportunities for millions. I am not sorry that we reformed welfare and put millions of people back to work. And I will never, ever apologize for America. It is the last best hope for Western civilization. Let's face it- no one flees for a better life from the United States, to say, Pakistan or anywhere for that matter. Why is it so hard for us, why is it so difficult for us to take pride in the fact of who we are, what we have created, what Western civilization really means.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

CPAC Afternoon Session http://video.c-span.org/archive/c08/c08_030207_cpac2.rm (March 2, 2007).

Life, War, People, Hope

“Jack: (to camera) My office! (indicates mess) I'm sorry about all this, but we in the Labour Party link drabness with idealism, see. I'm a paid agent of the party, but whenever I need to know anything I have to ring up Conservative Central Office. It's a very plush place, that - carpets plucking at your bleeding ankles. You see, they link drabness with idealism, too.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Vote, vote, vote for Nigel Barton (1965)

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Young India (15 September 1920), reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 21 (electronic edition), p. 252.
1920s

World, Anger

“The only place Al Gore conserves energy these days is on the treadmill. I don't want to suggest that Al's getting big, but the last time I saw him on TV I thought, "That reminds me — we have to do something about saving the polar bears."
Never mind his carbon footprint — have you seen the size of Al Gore's regular footprint lately? It's almost as deep as Janet Reno's.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"The Coming Ass Age" (21 March 2007) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=175. 2007

Time

“An intellectual who accommodates the ruling caste betrays the spirit. For the spirit is not conservative and grants no privileges. It dissolves; it equalizes; and it pushes through the ruins of hundreds of castles toward the final fulfillment of truth and justice, and their completion, even if it is the completion of death.”

Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) German poet

“Geist und Tat,” Essays (1960), p. 14, as cited in Russell Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=SQCCp2ZWGzQC&pg=PA45

Death, Truth, Justice

“When Ralph Goodale tried to tax Income Trusts they showed us where they stood, they showed us their attitude towards raiding Seniors hard earned assets and a Conservative government will never allow either of these parties to get away with that.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

39th Canadian General Election 2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mibZYpVPY - On October 31, 2006, barely ten months into the Conservative run minority Government of Canada, Canadian (Conservative) federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced a new 34% tax on income trust distributions. 2006

“McCain ran an aggressive, hard-hitting campaign against former Congressman J. D. Hayworth. If he had taken this same kind of principled conservative and ‘take no prisoners’ campaign against Barack Obama in 2008, he’d now be in the second year of his presidency.”

Richard Viguerie (1933) American writer

Richard Viguerie: McCain beats Hayworth; Tea Party wins; Welcome back to the GOP, Senator McCain http://www.conservativehq.com/blog_post/show/755

“I wanted to show that if you claim being trans is unacceptable in traditional Judaism, well, here is a community that is not just okay with accepting me as I am, but is celebrating with me, rejoicing with me. What I’m hoping is that by sharing my story, others in the same situation will realize that you can have your name changed in a synagogue. There are so many synagogues where you can’t, but there are also those where you can — the Jewish Reform movement, the Conservative movement. Within Orthodoxy, there’s still a long way to go. Every time something like this is done, it’s one step closer to acceptance for everyone.”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

Huffington Post, June 9, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/abby-stein-judaism_us_57574cbfe4b08f74f6c08963 2016

Hope, Way, Communication, Change

“b>It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think. Even though the soul craves for nothing but extinction and oblivion forever, the body is a conservative master which will not give up until the very end.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

People, Soul, Thinking

“Nurse: Ker… Kru… Crutchoffski, breast conservation? How are we feeling?
Sydney: A bit like an endangered wetland.”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#416, "The Basic Anxiety" (2003), collected in Invasion of the DTWOF (2005).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Feeling

“On the nationalist-conservative Right… Hitler was portrayed for the most part as intransigent and irresponsible, a wild and vulgar demagogue, not a statesman, an obstacle to political recovery, the head of an extreme movement with menacing socialistic tendencies.”

Ian Kershaw (1943) British historian

Source: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1999), p. 412

Parting

“For liberals, the observation that 'the peasants are revolting' is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2010, The great peasant revolt of 2010 (2010)

People, Optimism, Sense

“They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Ibid. (p. 116).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

People, Effort

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life, People, Age, World

“During my nine days' stay at Dacca, I visited most of the riot-affected areas of the city and suburbs. … The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on railway lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave me the rudest shock. … I reached Barisal town and was astounded to know of the happenings in Barisal. In the District town, a number of Hindu houses were burnt and a large number of Hindus killed. I visited almost all riot-affected areas in the District. … At the Madhabpasha Zamindar's house, about 200 people were killed and 40 injured. A place, called Muladi, witnessed a dreadful hell. At Muladi Bandar alone, the number killed would total more than three hundred, as was reported to me by the local Muslims including some officers. I visited Muladi village also, where I found skeletons of dead bodies at some places. I found dogs and vultures eating corpses on he river-side. I got the information there that after the whole-scale killing of all adult males, all the young girls were distributed among the ringleaders of the miscreants. At a place called Kaibartakhali under P. S. Rajapur, 63 persons were killed. Hindu houses within a stone's throw distance from the said thana office were looted, burnt and inmates killed. All Hindu shops of Babuganj Bazar were looted and then burnt and a large number of Hindus were killed. From detailed information received, the conservative estimate of casualties was placed at 2,500 killed in the District of Barisal alone. Total casualties of Dacca and East Bengal riot were estimated to be in the neighbourhood of 10,000 killed. The lamentation of women and children who had lost their all including near and dear ones melted my heart. I only asked myself "What was coming to Pakistan in the name of Islam."”

Jogendra Nath Mandal (1904–1968) Pakistani politician

Excerpted from the resignation letter of J. N. Mandal, Minister for Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan, October 8, 1950. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Resignation_letter_of_Jogendra_Nath_Mandal https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Resignation_letter_of_Jogendra_Nath_Mandal

Women, Children, People, Dogs

“In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify.”

Ramachandra Guha (1958) historian and writer from India

[Guha, Ramachandra, Where Are The Conservative Intellectuals in India?, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/where-are-the-conservative-intellectuals-in-india-caravan.html, Caravan, March 2015]

Books, Family, Religion, Reading

“There were a lot of people who were Reaganauts going in, as there are always people who are conservatives going in. But they don't act like conservatives after they get there. There is skill to maneuvering the bureaucracy. And I think one argument I could make would be, I've never run for office, I'm not a conventional politician, that's for sure, but I have been in government, and I know how it works. I have actually gotten things done in the government.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

People, Thinking

“We came from a conservative family, many of whom had never even gone to school. But I was sent to a convent and everyone was very proud that I was educated. So once while I was performing in Madras, a director from AVM studios spotted me. They were looking for a fresh face and they immediately wanted to cast me, and my grandmother grudgingly accepted.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

In "There's no slowing down for Vyjayanthimala".

Education, School, Family

“The idea that the Founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The Founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually — their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who're, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“The Founding Fathers Deconstructed,” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=577 WorldNetDaily.com, December 3, 2010. 2010s, 2010

Men, Idea

“I look around this room and see a room full of senators, maybe one or two judges. A Conservative government will give jobs to people in other parties only after I've been prime minister for fifteen years and can't find a single living, breathing Tory to appoint.”

Brian Mulroney (1939) 18th Prime Minister of Canada

(1983) [Newman, Peter, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, 2005, Random House Canada, Toronto, 0-679-31351-6], p. 94.

People

“For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual’s interests.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 55

School

“We have been threatened by a local conservative group who said they will picket the show unless I am fired and taken off the bill and replaced by someone else. Sorry. I am now more excited than ever to meet y'all. Personally, if you are going to picket a show, fine, but the fact that you are picketing my show, means you are stepping up to me, which means some very bad things could possibly happen to you.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Weblog

Personality

“As we liked to do as children, extracting from the soft forest floor the light chestnut trees only a few centimeters high at the base of which the chestnut continues to shine to the sun its clods of soil from the past, the chestnut conserving all of its presence and witnessing with its presence the power of green hands, of shadow, of airy white or pink pyramids of dances.... and of future chestnuts which, under new dust, would be discovered by the marveled sight of other children. It is in this perspective that the work of Arp, more than any other, should be situated. He found the most vital in himself in the secrets of this germinating life where the most minimal detail is of the greatest importance, where, on the other hand, the distinction between the elements becomes meaningless, adopting a peculiar under the rock humor permanently.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote from Anthologie de l'humour noir, André Breton; as cited in Arp, ed. Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa S. A., Barcelona, Spain, 1988
after 1930

Life, Children, Secret, Tree

“The star of that year's conference was undoubtedly the Swedish conservative leader—since Prime Minister—who delivered a speech of such startling Thatcherite soundness that in applauding I felt as if I was giving myself a standing ovation.”

Margaret Thatcher book The Downing Street Years

On Carl Bildt's speech to the International Democratic Union.
The Downing Street Years (1993)

Star

“Most Americans don't live their lives solely as Democrats or Republicans or conservatives or liberals. Most Americans live their lives that are just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often it’s something they do not want to do, but they do it. Impossible things get done every day that are only made possible by the little, reasonable compromises.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear closing speech (2010)

“Political statements all have a battle flavour - attack, counter-attack, defence. Left political statements generally have a counter-attack flavour, though the Conservative flavour is not attack but defence. A large part of Left rhetoric is spent in imposing the 'attack' flavour on the Conservative position (for example, in such phrases as: 'inspired Capitalist opinion', 'predatory imperialist interests', 'the ruling financial oligarchy').”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Harry Kemp from The Left Heresy in Literature and Life (London: Methuen, 1939)

Parting

“DR JAMES DOBSON: Well, there's been an awful lot of hate expressed in this election. And most of it has been aimed at those who hold to conservative Christian views. He is certainly not the only one to take a position like that. But I think that that is -that's where he's coming from. He has certainly opposed most of the things that conservative Christians stand for.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

2004

Hate, Thinking

“In the opposition proper, both among the liberal conservatives and among the Populares, the storms of revution had made fearful havoc…. In the 'democractic' party, among the rising youth, Gaius Julius Caesar, who was twenty-four years of age (born 12 July 102 B. C.) drew towards him the eyes of friend and foe. His relationship with Marius and Cinna (his father's sister had been the wife of Marius, he himself had married Cinna's daughter); the courageous refusal of the youth who had scrace outgrown the age of boyhood to send a divorce to his young wife cornelia at the biddining of the Dictator, as P(ompeius had in the like case done; his bold persistence in the priesthood conferred upon him by Marius, but revoked by Sulla; his wanderings during the proscription with which he was threatened, and which was with difficulty”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

Youth, Age, Fear, Courage

“…in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.
Faith for Living (1940)

Past, Future

“I don't think either one of them literally want to incite violence. But they have to realize that when they tell people to get up in your face, that there are some crazy unstable people out there. There are truly people who have anger issues. The guy that shot over two hundred rounds from a semi-automatic weapon at us at the ballfield, was an angry guy. He was a guy that would go down to the city council and yell and scream and get angry and red in the face. He once hit a neighbor with the butt of his gun. He had all of these anger issues. But then when people stoke that and say "get up in their face", "go to Washington". He showed up at the ballfield that day, and as he started shooting at us he yelled "This is for healthcare!", and then when they were finally able to kill him in his pocket was a list of five or six conservative republicans that he came there intending to kill. So instead of saying "get up in their face", we should say let's have constructive dialog. Let's forcefully present our position in a verbal way and in an intellectual way.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2010s

People, Way, Guy, Thinking

“[Professor Jennifer] Burns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives or liberals for that matter, refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism—a system in which huge corporations, aided by the state, dominate a heavily-regulated and centrally-directed economy. This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate, this is what the New Left opposed. One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me thirty years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labour, specialise in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. Bookchin told me that he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions.”

Jeff Riggenbach (1947)

About Murray Bookchin
"Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement," 2010

People, Understanding

“One respectful question will be addressed to Jews who plan to continue to eat meat: In view of strong Jewish mandates to be compassionate to animals, preserve our health, help feed the hungry, preserve and protect the environment, conserve resources, and seek and pursue peace, and the very negative effects animal-centered diets have in each of these areas, will you now become a vegetarian, or at least sharply reduce your consumption of animal products?”

Richard H. Schwartz (1934) American mathematician and writer

Judaism and Vegetarianism (revised edition, New York: Lantern Books, 2001), pp. 181 https://archive.org/stream/JudaismAndVegetarianism#page/n205/mode/2up-182.

Health, Peace, Question, Strong

“We are now faced with massive unemployment, on a scale certainly at the level of the 1930s and to become greater. The improvement in housing, education and the standard of living has stopped. To all of us, that is a matter of the greatest possible regret…One of our intentions after the 1930s was to ensure that the Conservative Party was never again considered to be the party of unemployment. I ask my hon. Friends to think seriously about that in our present circumstances.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (27 November 1980) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1980/nov/27/industry-and-the-economy Post-Prime Ministerial

Education, Thinking, Housing

“Being conservative is a way of being skeptic.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Ser conservador es una forma de ser escéptico. Interview in Revista Extra (July 1976) http://www.sololiteratura.com/bor/borsellamaborges.htm

Way

“Defined in broadest terms, public administration consists of all those operations having for their purpose the fulfillment or enforcement of public policy. This definition covers a multitude of particular operations in many fields — the delivery of a letter, the sale of public land, the negotiation of a treaty, the award of compensation to an injured workman, the quarantine of a sick child, the removal of litter from a park, manufacturing plutonium, and licensing the use of atomic energy. It includes military as well as civil affairs, much of the work of courts, and all the special fields of government activity— police, education, health, construction of public works, conservation, social security, and many others.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 1

Health, Education

“When I listened to the Prime Minister's speech last night, in which he gave such a travesty of the policy of the Labour Party, I realized at once what was his object. He wanted the electors to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives. He feared lest those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further. I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly. The voice we heard last night was that of Mr. Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (5 June 1945) for the 1945 general election, quoted in The Times (6 June 1945), p. 2.
1940s

War, Fear, Understanding, Night

“The Smethwick Conservatives can have the satisfaction of having topped the poll, and of having sent here as their Member one who, until a further General Election restores him to oblivion, will serve his term here as a Parliamentary leper”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons (3 November 1964) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1964/nov/03/debate-on-the-address-first-day. The 1964 general election had seen the defeat of Wilson's Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker by Conservative Peter Griffiths after an allegedly racist campaign. Griffiths was indeed defeated at the next election but returned to Parliament in 1979 and served until 1997. Prime Minister

“Like the Republican Party, CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. … So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the blood and soil nationalists of Europe.”

Mona Charen (1957) political writer

I'm Glad I Got Booed at CPAC (2018)

Past

“During the final months of the campaign, as polls indicated that I had a real chance of becoming the next leader, opposition from the supply management lobby gathered speed. Radio-Canada reported on dairy farmers who were busy selling Conservative Party memberships across Quebec. A Facebook page called Les amis de la gestion de l’offre et des régions (Friends of supply management and regions) was set up and had gathered more than 10,500 members by early May. As members started receiving their ballots by mail from the party, its creator, Jacques Roy, asked them to vote for Andrew Scheer.
Andrew, along with several other candidates, was then busy touring Quebec’s agricultural belt, including my own riding of Beauce, to pick up support from these fake Conservatives, only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges. Interestingly, one year later, most of them have not renewed their memberships and are not members of the party anymore. During these last months of the campaign, the number of members in Quebec had increased considerably, from about 6,000 to more than 16,000. In April 2018, according to my estimates, we are down to about 6,000 again.
A few days after the vote, Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the CBC, calculated that if only 66 voters in a few key ridings had voted differently, I could have won. The points system, by which every riding in the country represented 100 points regardless of the number of members they had, gave outsized importance in the vote to a handful of ridings with few members. Of course, a lot more than 66 supply management farmers voted, likely thousands of them in Quebec, Ontario, and the other provinces. I even lost my riding of Beauce by 51% to 49%, the same proportion as the national vote.
At the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa a few days after the vote, a gala where personalities make fun of political events of the past year, Andrew was said to have gotten the most laughs when he declared: “I certainly don’t owe my leadership victory to anybody…”, stopping in mid-sentence to take a swig of 2% milk from the carton. “It’s a high quality drink and it’s affordable too.” Of course, it was so funny because everybody in the room knew that was precisely why he got elected. He did what he thought he had to do to get the most votes, and that is fair game in a democratic system. But this also helps explain why so many people are so cynical about politics, and with good reason.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

page 23 in "Live or die with supply management", chapter 5 previewed April 2018 http://www.maximebernier.com/my_chapter_on_supply_management of "Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada"

People, Game, Drink, Business

“It would be inconceivable for the House to adjourn for Easter without recording the fact that last Friday the High Court disallowed an Act which was passed by this House and the House of Lords and received Royal Assent — the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. The High Court referred the case to the European Court…I want to make it clear to the House that we are absolutely impotent unless we repeal Section 2 of the European Communities Act. It is no good talking about being a good European. We are all good Europeans; that is a matter of geography and not a matter of sentiment. Are the arrangements under which we are governed such that we have broken the link between the electorate and the laws under which they are governed? I am an old parliamentary hand — perhaps I have been here too long — but I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that when people vote in an election they must be entitled to know that the party for which they vote, if it has a majority, will be able to enact laws under which they will be governed. That is no longer true. Any party elected, whether it is the Conservative party or the Labour party can no longer say to the electorate, "Vote for me and if I have a majority I shall pass that law", because if that law is contrary to Common Market law, British judges will apply Common Market law.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in the House of Commons (13 March 1989) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/mar/13/adjournment-easter-and-monday-1-may on the Factortame case 1980s

People, Law, Communication, Housing

“There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Nixon: Maestro of Resentment" (1990).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Guy, Success, Personality

“Question: …you believe the Fed shouldn't exist… make the case.
Ron Paul: First reason is, it's not authorized in the Constitution, it's an illegal institution. The second reason, it's an immoral institution, because we have delivered to a secretive body the privilege of creating money out of thin air; if you or I did it, we'd be called counterfeiters, so why have we legalized counterfeiting? But the economic reasons are overwhelming: the Federal Reserve is the creature that destroys value. This station talks about free market capitalism, and you can't have free market capitalism if you have a secret bank creating money and credit out of thin air. They become the central planners, they decide what interest rates should be, what the supply of money should be…
Question: How does the gold standard solves that?
Ron Paul: It maintains a stable currency and a stable value. If the Fed concentrated more on stable money rather than stable prices… They push up new money in stocks and in commodities and in houses, and then they have to come in to rescue the situation. They create the bubbles, then they come in and rescue it, and they do nothing more than try to do price fixing. Capitalism depends, and capital comes from savings, but there's no savings in this country, so this is all artificial. It creates the misdirection and the malinvestment and all the excessive debt, and it always has to have a correction. Since the Fed has been in existence, the dollar has lost about 97% of its value. You're supposed to encourage savings, but if something loses its value, why save dollars? There's no encouragement whatsoever. […] Gold is 6000 years old, and it still maintains its purchasing power. Oil prices really are very stable in terms of Gold. […] Both conservatives and liberals want to enhance big government, and this is a seductive way to tax the middle class.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

CNBC debate with Faiz Shakir, March 20, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94VWPjUQSM 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, Secret, Way, Question

“It doesn’t take much refection—and indeed only a little research—to discover that the kind of conservative readings of the Genesis story that are often put up in opposition to what it is thought Darwin said (often without bothering to read what Darwin himself had to say) bear almost no relation to what we find in the refection of the fathers on the account found in Genesis. Such Christians have imagined a tradition that has no right to call itself tradition.”

Andrew Louth (1944)

"Being Human," The Wheel, Spring/Summer 2018

Imagination, Reading

“I am a conservative, but I am not a zombie.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2006-05-11
2000s

“In this very special form, feedback became part of the jargon of Group Dynamics, which has also assumed many of the characteristics of a cult in the efforts made to conserve some of the rigor of procedure with which Kurt Lewin and the experimentalist, Alex Bavelas, had attempted to imbue it. In this case, far from serving as a catalyzing, high-level theoretical tool, the term feedback has become a jargon-catchall for any kind of report back to government, management, the subjects of an experiment, subjects during an experiment, and so on. Stripped of its intellectual potential, the term knocks about the corridors of Unesco and for the most part those who use it have no idea that this bit of enjoined, Group Dynamic-recommended behavior is in any way related to the forbidding cross-disciplinary integration known as cybernetics.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 273

Way, Behavior, Idea, Effort

“I think the prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong and I've never supported it. And I don't think any Conservative government would have done it.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

BBC Sunday AM (15 January 2006)
2000s, 2006

School, Support, Thinking

“James W. Fifield Jr. … convinced the industrialists that clergymen could be the means of regaining the upper hand in their war with Roosevelt in the coming years. As men of God, they could give voice to the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest.”

Kevin M. Kruse (1972) American historian

Source: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), p. 7

Men, God, War, Motivation

“When it comes to philosophical convictions, most conservatives more closely resemble their beltway liberal friends than Republican Party voters. From the country's dismal finances and propagandized population, a sizable segment has concluded that conservative power-brokers and liberal power-brokers are indistinguishable.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump Doesn’t Need to Talk Like A Conservative," http://www.unz.com/imercer/trump-doesnt-need-to-talk-like-a-conservative/ The Unz Review, March 19, 2016. 2010s, 2016

Country

“Conservatives believe in individual freedom and responsibility. Liberals believe in sacrificing individual freedom for socially desirable outcomes. Liberals believe that one of government's primary roles is social engineering.”

Mike Rosen (1944) American political pundit

Rocky Mountain News column, 2000

Freedom

“I remain a skeptic about Donald Trump. Trump fans look at us skeptics with incredulity that we could possibly object to their man… Yet I see people comparing Trump to Reagan. Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes.”

Jim Geraghty (1975) American journalist

"The Corner" http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/420996/trump-2008-bush-evil-talk-iran-obama-cannot-do-worse-bush-jim-geraghty (2015), National Review

People

“Republicans may be in control of the legislative branch, but they lack principled leadership. Consequently, true conservatives have faced an increasingly hostile environment from the DC establishment. It takes more than empty rhetoric to lead. The GOP must become a party of principle again. And in so doing, we have to learn to fight for conservatism and our Constitution again.”

Chris McDaniel (1971) American politician

Mississippi’s Chris McDaniel: Oust Boehner http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/01/05/mississippis-chris-mcdaniel-oust-boehner/ (January 5, 2015)

Hostility, Learning, Fight

“After decades of advocacy for wolf conservation using all possible means to sell the goal of wolf recovery, it is now necessary to start advocating for compromise between wolf and human interests.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

Wolf

“I am not a career politician. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I'm a working man with commonsense ideas and goals. I describe myself politically as fiscally conservative and socially moderate-to-liberal.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

Idea

“The conscience of a conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being. Today, therefore, he is at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally with those gentler activists who ask our permission to play God with the human race.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), as quoted in the Preface
Conscience of a Conservative (2017)

God

“Democrat Grover Cleveland was America’s last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that ‘the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“ Trump Doesn’t Need To Talk Like A Con-Servative http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/trump-doesnt-need-to-talk-like-a-conservative/,” WND.com, March 17, 2016 2010s, 2016

People, Support

“Placement of both Hayek and Mill in the liberal tradition is suspect to many historians of political thought for various reasons. First, Mill also expressed socialist sentiments, so to classify him as a liberal has seemed inaccurate to some more right-inclined liberals. Second, Hayek is sometimes considered more a conservative by left-inclined liberals, and not in the liberal tradition as it has evolved. Nonetheless, Mill and Hayek were the two greatest liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“Conservatives need to be reinvigorated in their pursuit of core principles; the movement must become more than simply an ideological fig leaf for the Republican Party. It is time to focus on achieving real victory—a victory over the economic collectivism and cultural barbarism that is modern liberalism.”

Jeffrey T. Kuhner (1969) American journalist

The Conservative Surrender http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17803, Human Events, 2006-11-1

Time, Victory

“Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

Lecture notes ms. (c. 1935); as quoted in: Curt D. Meine, ‎Richard L. Knight (1999) The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries. p. 162.
1930s

“Being Conservative is only another way of being British.”

Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (1907–2001) British judge, politician, life peer and Cabinet minister

Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (Penguin, 1947).

Way

“This is not a confrontation between ‘left’ and ‘right’. I am trying to represent the deep feelings of those many thousands of rank-and-file Tories in the country—and potential Conservative voters, too—who feel let down by our party and find themselves unrepresented in a political vacuum.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in Finchley (31 January 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102605 Shadow Secretary for Environment

Feeling, Country

“I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round – a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

Geoffrey Howe (1926–2015) British Conservative politician

Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 951 col. 1027.
Denis Healey, Howe's opposite number as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government, speaking in the House of Commons on 14 June, 1978.
About

Parting, Dead

“The most abstract conservation laws of physics come into their being in describing equilibrium in the most extreme conditions. They are the most rigorous conservation laws, the last to break down. The more extreme the conditions, the fewer the conserved structures… In a deep sense, we understand the interior of the sun better that the interior of the earth, and the early stages of the big bang best of all.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Fourth Theme, Prelude Four
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Law, Understanding, Sense, Sun

“Some of you would prefer a Tory Government. We know our enemies. I have come across a coalition of Conservatives and Communists before. Tories have a very warm place in their hearts for Communists and so have the Communists for the Tories.”

Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) British Labour politician

The Times, 4 November 1930, quoted in Bernard Donoughue and George Jones, "Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician" (Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 236.

Heart

“… We cannot get big grants to do field work anymore. … Will the next generation of conservation biologists be nothing but a bunch of computer nerds with no firsthand knowledge of natural history? … The naturalists are dying off and have few heirs.”

Reed Noss (1952)

[The naturalists are dying off, Conservation Biology, 10, 1, February 1996, 1–3, 10.1046/j.1523-1739.1996.10010001.x] (quote from p. 1)

History, Nature, Knowledge

“[I was] a youth in his twenty third year, young of his age, who had seen little or nothing of the world, who resigned himself to politics, but whose desire had been for the ministry of God. The remains of this desire operated unfortunately. They made me tend to glorify in an extravagant manner and degree not only the religious character of the State, which in reality stood low, but also the religious mission of the Conservative party. There was, to my eyes, a certain element of AntiChrist in the Reform Act and that Act was cordially hated. … It was only under the (second) Government of Sir Robert Peel that I learned how impotent [and] barren was the conservative office for the Church.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

'My Earlier Political Opinions. (II) The Extrication' (16 July 1892), quoted in John Brooke and Mary Sorensen (eds.), The Prime Minister's Papers: W. E. Gladstone. I: Autobiographica (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1971), p. 40.
1890s

God, Hate, Youth, Age

“You can't prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell - although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I'd say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn't really looked at either painter's work. Taste is a blood sport.”

Jerry Saltz (1951) American art historian

Source: " Has Money Ruined Art? http://nymag.com/arts/art/season2007/38981/," nymag.com, 2007

Sport

“One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 210.

Communication, Motivation, Animals, Dependency

“Personal responsibility is a big idea about which little is known. It has received far less study than other key conservative tenets, like economic choice. This lack of attention is striking because personal responsibility is a defining assumption in American thought.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

Idea, Study, Personality

“It is bad because it is a negation of democracy … Worst of all is the imposition by parliamentary diktat of a change of responsible party in London government. There cannot be any justification for that. It immediately lays the Conservative Party open to the charge of the greatest gerrymandering in the last 150 years of British history.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (11 April 1984) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1984/apr/11/local-government-interim-provisions-bill opposing the 'paving Bill' preparing for abolition of the Greater London Council, 1984. Post-Prime Ministerial

Democracy, History, Change

“In 1964, days before the presidential election which, incidentally, we lost, Ronald Reagan went on national television and challenged America saying that it was a "Time for Choosing." He saw two paths for America, one that embraced conservative principles dedicated to lifting people out of poverty and helping create opportunity for all, and the other, an oppressive government that would lead America down a darker, less free path. I'm no Ronald Reagan and this is a different moment but I believe with all my heart and soul that we face another time for choosing, one that will have profound consequences for the Republican Party and more importantly, for the country.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2016, Remarks on Donald Trump and the 2016 race

People, Soul, Time, Help

“The conclusion seems to be irresistible that such laws of nature as the principle of conservation of energy, the principle of conservation of momentum and the law of gravitation are necessary consequences of our modes of measurement. They are, in fact, elaborately disguised identities which could have been predicted a priori by a being of sufficiently powerful analytical insight who fully understood all that is implied in the way we measure space-time intervals.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

As quoted by Gerald James Whitrow, The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

Law, Way, Nature, Time

“The reason liberals despise Clarence Thomas or caricature a Ben Carson, more so than they do white conservative justices or public figures, is the threat that they pose to the entire engine of liberal condescension — and Democratic politics. When successful blacks prove that they easily compete in the marketplace of talent and ideas without liberal racial policies and their political henchmen, then the entire architecture of liberal racial politics collapses. The disdain shown a Thomas or Carson suggests that liberal racial politics serve as private medieval penance in the abstract, and at little personal cost for assuaging guilt over liberal apartheid.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, "Black Lives Matter"—a Year From Now (2015)

Justice, Idea, Success, Personality

“Labour has always been a coalition between workerist and progressive elements, liberals and conservatives, mediated by socialism. It was held together by the belief that we are social beings who resist the domination of capital through democracy; and by the refusal to accept that human beings are a commodity or that our inheritance is exclusively monetary.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

New Statesman article, 3 November 2016 http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2016/11/things-dont-only-get-better-why-working-class-fell-out-love-labour

Democracy

“Wilt thou then, my soul, never be good and simple and one and naked, more manifest than the body which surrounds thee? Wilt thou never enjoy an affectionate and contented disposition? Wilt thou never be full and without a want of any kind, longing for nothing more, nor desiring anything, either animate of inanimate, for the enjoyment of pleasures? nor yet desiring time wherein thou shalt have longer enjoyment, or place, or pleasant climate, or society of men with whom thou mayst live in harmony? but wilt thou be satisfied with thy present condition, and pleased with all that is around thee, and wilt thou convince thyself that thou hast everything and that it comes from the gods, that everything is well for thee, and will be well whatever shall please them, and whatever they shall give for the conservation of the perfect living being, the good and just and beautiful, which generates and holds together all things, and contains and embraces all things which are dissolved for the production of other like things? Wilt thou never be such that thou shalt so dwell in community with gods and men as neither to find fault with them at all, nor to be condemned by them?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 1
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Men, God, Pleasure, Beauty

“As queen, Farah achieved almost immediate popularity. She had several features that pleased the Iranians: she was 'fully Iranian' and also worthy of honour because she descended from the family of the Prophet. She was a brunette with deep black eyes of the kind most Persians cherish. (The Shah's outlandish taste for blondes was not shared by his compatriots.) Farah appeared to be slightly taller than the Shah, but this could not be held against her. The new queen's athletic physique and her well-publicised love of sports disconcerted some religious circles, but even the more conservative Iranians now understood that times were changing.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Love, Family, Sport, Appearance

Quotes about conservative page 5

Quotes about conservative
page 5