Liberals and Conservatives


In the sixties, liberalism gained a foothold in the United States as at no time since the New Deal. All eyes turned toward Washington to solve the problems in everyone's life. Soon, the liberal elite discovered that many problems were caused by people's own ignorance. "Consumer protection" laws were enacted. Meanwhile, taxes increased and government became more and more a part of daily life as bureaucracies took on a life of their own.

In its extreme forms, this liberalism took a form close to that advocated by the Utopian Socialists of the past. Property was an evil and unnecessary in a truly civilized society. Everyone would be cared for and no one would be hungry or want for shelter or a job. Somewhere in all this idealistic thinking it was forgotten that all practical attempts to start Utopian communities in the real world ended in abject failure. Most people, when faced with a choice between working and not working, chose not working when there was no incentive to do otherwise.

The modern-day Democratic Party, especially at the fringes, shares these same beliefs and delusions. Ted Kennedy advocates national health insurance and many members of that party have pushed for a nuclear freeze, a sort of pacifism born of an unreasoning hope in the good intentions of the other side.

Conservativism, as embodied by the modern Republican Party, is not without its foibles when it comes to regulating people's lifes. On the whole, however, conservatives have a tendency toward suspicion of governmental institutions and tend to distrust idealism and good intentions in all their forms. Such suspicion and dustrust is usually well-founded.


Visionary: A fellow with a new idea.
Realist:
A fellow who doesn't like the idea.
H.I. Philip

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Conservatism is the worship of dead revolutions.
Clinton Rossiter

Republicans sleep in twin beds -- some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats.
Will Stanton

Join the Republican party if you cannot abide Democrats. You will probably loathe Republicans just as much, but there are fewer of them.
Anthony

I never said all Democrats were saloon-keepers. What I said was that all saloon-keepers were Democrats.
Horace Greely

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he's a boss; when he's in the Republican Party he's a leader.
Harry S Truman

Both sides cheat; it is simply the Democrats, having more experience, are more artful about it.
Len O'Connor

Democrats, you know, want to identify with and relate to what you're feeling, what you've been bummed out about, where your head is at.
Martin Nolan

Democrats give their old clothes to the poor, Republicans wear theirs.
New York Times

The Democratic Party will live and continue to receive the support of the majority of Americans just so long as it remains a liberal party.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

A Democratic president is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid squirting darkness all about him.
Clare Boothe Luce

They [Democrats] are the troubadours and the crooners of catastrophe.
Clare Boothe Luce

The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother always a Democrat.
Robert Frost

I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's Liberals and Americans.
James Watt

There are only six Democrats in all of Hinsdale Country and you, you son of a bitch, you ate five of them.
Colorado judge, sentencing Alfred E. Packer for canibalizing 5 members of a prospecting party in 1874

Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.
Sen. S.I. Hayakawa

Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race is divided into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from the highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
Robert Heinlein

A hawk is Barry Goldwater saying the Vietnam War should have been over in fifteen minutes.
Jeffrey Hart

Democrats believe people are basically good but must be saved from themselves by the government. Republicans believe people are basically bad but they'll be okay if they're left alone.
Andy Rooney

Republicans view women as participants in government, in the marketplace, in mainstream America. Democrats, on the other hand, view women as outsiders and recipients.
Barbara Vucanovich, US House member

Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmations and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids and taxes.
Craig Hosmer, U.S. Representative

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!
David Stan Jordan

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H.L. Mencken

My prayer to God is a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." God has granted it.
Voltaire

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H.L. Mencken

Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
H.L. Mencken

I never dared to be radical when I was young, for fear I would become conservative when I was old.
Robert Frost

Socialism will be here the day we share our profits to the degree we share our failures.
Malcolm Forbes

I am free of all prejudices. I hate all people equally.
W.C. Fields

Man is always ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
Paul Elridge

To die for an idea -- it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.
H.L. Mencken

The middle of the road is the best place to get run over.
Alan Craig Loughrige

The only things you find in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead cats.
Russell Long

If you want an example of the failure of socialism, don't go to Russia. Come to America and go to the American Indian reservations.
James Watt

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.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Socialism is workable only in heaven where it isn't needed and in hell where they've got it.
Cecil Palmer

Liberal boys grow up playing M*A*S*H. Middle-of-the-road boys play soldier. Conservative boys play mercenary.
California Review

Conservative girls grow up playing Margaret Thatcher, flotilla commander. Middle-of-the road girls play house. Liberal girls play ever-expanding sexuality.
California Review

I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older -- a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out.
William Styron, on the Forties generation

Any well-established town in New England or the northern middle-west could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.
Denis William Brogan

A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"
William F. Buckley Jr.

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.
William F. Buckley Jr.

The further an individual is from the poorhouse, the more expert one becomes on the ghetto.
James L. Davis

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend than be one.
Clarence Darrow

If there were no poor, the liberals would have to invent them.
Lawrence Chickering Jr.

Although I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.
G.K. Chesterton

WE had an affirmative action program too -- if you didn't work you didn't eat.
George Champion, former Chase Manhattan chairman

From a will: And to my communist nephew Oswald, I leave the sum of 10,000 pounds -- to be shared equally with his fellow Britishers.
John Carpenter

As far as unwed mothers on welfare are concerned, it seems to me that they must be capable of some other form of labor.
Al Capp

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.
William F. Buckley Jr.

Do you know what a conservative is? That's a liberal who got mugged the night before.
Frank Rizzo, former Philadelphia mayor

It must be that the American press, public, and political establishment take secret pleasure in suffering the persistent, pervasive lies of their government. What else but a diagnosis of mass informational masochism could explain the credulous acceptance of Washington's official line on the South Korean airliner attack?
The Nation editorial

We're going to move left and right at the same time.
Governor Jerry Brown

Appeasers believe that if you keep throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.
Heywood Brown

One's liberalism tends to be directly proportional to the size of one's father's checkbook.
Kimberly Boyer

The more I hear of ban-the-gun legislation forming in Washington, and the more I hear it advocated from the editorial pulpit of the New York Times, the more I want my own .45 holstered within easy reach of this typewriter.
Patrick Bedard

The defect of equality is that we desire it only with superiors.
Henry Decque

There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
Russell Baker

All the Chicago demonstrators wanted to do was to sleep in the park and kick policemen with razor blades in their shoes.
Spiro Agnew

As for those deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and uncivil disobedients among the young, SDS, PLP, Weathermen I and Weathermen II, the revolutionary action movement, the Black United Front, Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, Lions and Tigers alike -- I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.
Spiro Agnew

Those who believe patriotism to be the last refuge of the scoundrel have underestimated compassion.
R. Emmett Tyrrell

The idea [of the Draft] has been around for a long time -- "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" -- and it seems to have a perennial fascination for some liberals who believe we all ought to volunteer for something, whether we want to or not.
The Progressive

We still don't wish NAS [National Audubon Society] ill tidings...We can understand that any organization named after one who slaughtered one or more of every species of bird existing in North America in the 19th Century in pursuit of painting gorgeous pictures of them would acquire something of a permanent guilt complex.
R.W. Scott, editor of World Oil

I fight poverty. I work.
Graffito

Until you're prepared to kill your parents, you're not really prepared to change the country because our parents are our first oppressors.
Jerry Rubin

We're not really pacifists, we're just nonviolent soldiers.
Joan Baez

I found draft resistors very conscientious, reasonable, and not fanatics.
Daniel Ellsberg

I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it's the most neurotic life-style ever developed.
Germaine Greer

Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.
Jane Fonda

We've got to establish a socialistic economic structure that will limit private, profit-oriented businesses.
Jane Fonda

I would not take one cup of coffee from a grower...There's not a good one. I hate them. A few presents, a little talk, then the noose. That's how capitalism works.
Cesar Chavez

The trouble begins with the United States which is flying arms and exporting counterrevolution from bases in El Salvador to contra outposts in Nicaragua. This is American aggression on a grand scale and it is crassly hypocritical for the President to tell the world otherwise.
The Nation editorial

The times demand eclectic and innovative thinking -- strategems that combine the wizardry of Silicon valley and the finely tuned conscience of the Left.
Daniel Talbot, Mother Jones

It's like being against typhoons.
Tom Wolfe, on the nuclear freeze movement

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man; which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
G. Gordon Liddy

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, inter-connected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.
Jerry Brown

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.
James Watt, on environmentalists

The conservative and controversial Mr. Watt exhibited a fine, admirable propensity for infuriating the ultra-liberal, no-growth set, which places much more value on the life of parasites than humans and usually masquerades under the guise of one environmental group or another. It is too bad that we all cannot contribute as much to upsetting the kooky crowd as Mr. Watt did.
R.W. Scott, Editor of World Oil

In England "The Day After," though unpopular with viewers, seems to have confirmed the average Englishman's mindless prejudice against Kansas. Shortly after the film portrayed that state being turned into an overused barbecue pit by nuclear weapons, support for British nuclear weapons rose a full percentage point.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Major investment decisions have become too important to be left to the private sector.
Lester C. Thurow

The biggest threat to this country isn't the Russians. It's our own inability to make democracy or capitalism work.
Phil Donahue

Liberals don't care what you do as long as it's compulsory.
M. Stanton Evans

There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.
M. Stanton Evans

Once again the Naderites were onstage attacking the Educational Testing Service -- the organization which develops and administers the scholastic aptitude tests...the reason for the wax is that the E.T.S. tests persist in showing some people to be smarter than others. And if some people are smarter than others, there might actually be some justification for an economic system in which some people have more money and authority than others.
Daniel Seligman, Fortune

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately, none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.
Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister

A divorced middle-aged woman who would have trouble winning a beauty contest against Bella Abzug.
Anne Crutcher, American Spectator, of Betty Frieden

...only liberal organizations are clearly designated [in the press] as "nonpatisan, nonprofit." Non-liberal research organizations are always identified as "right-wing" or conservative."
Irving Kristol

The orthodox environmental theories [of heredity] have been accepted not because they have stood up under proper scientific investigations, but because they harmonize so well with our democratic belief in human equality.
Arthur Jensen

We're the only nation in the world where most of our poor people are fat.
Phil Gramm

For the [Reagan] administration to preach a free-market economy to the developing countries is like Marie-Antoinette telling the people to eat cake.
Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American

The problem of individual differences and group differences would not be made to disappear by abolishing tests. One cannot treat a fever by throwing away the thermometer.
Arthur Jensen, in Bias in Mental Testing

The left in Canada is more gauche than sinister.
John Harney

As far as I'm concerned, environmentalists and food stamp cheaters are the same thing.
Tom Hagedorn

For the most part neoconservatives are people who were once liberals but sobered up. The neoliberal is one who has always been a liberal but now replaces the sentimental pieties with brusque slogans ("High-Tech!") and unpronounceable programs. All else stays the same.
R.Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

I can remember back when a liberal was one who was generous with his own money.
Will Rogers

Wearing love beads and touting our sincerity will not make this a safer world.
Ronald Reagan

One difference between a liberal and a pickpocket is that if you demand your money back from a pickpocket, he won't question your motives.
National Review

If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it'll be the last car he'll ever lay down in front of.
George C. Wallace

Conservationists: Clausewitzian nature lovers who as sworn enemies of all official despoilers and polluters make war on the environment by other means.
Bernard Rosenberg

A liberal is a man who wants to use his own ideas on things in preference to generations who he knows know more than he does.
Will Rogers

If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement.
Ronald Reagan, on the question of silencing campus radicals, 1970

I'd like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.
Ronald Reagan, on student demonstrations in California, 1966

It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism.
Ronald Reagan, on the Hearst family's giveaway of food to the poor as a partial ransom for their daughter Patty

Poverty is a career for lots of well-paid people.
Ronald Reagan

A "Hippie" is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheeta.
Ronald Reagan

A Liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment.
Willis Player

Now plans for the disposal of expended nuclear fuels involve such strategies as... The Pournelle method. The No Nukes types tell us that stretches of the American desert have already been rendered useless for thousands of years because thermonuclear bombs were tested there. Let us take them at their word. Cart the nuclear wastes into a patch of cratered desert. Put several miles of fence around it and signs on the fence: IF YOU CROSS THIS FENCE YOU WILL DIE. Granted there will be people willing to cross the fence. Think of it as evolution in action. Average human intelligence goes up a fraction of a percent.
Larry Niven

Today, at Harvard, any student with the currently fashionable color of skin is given rights denied to students of the currently unfashionable color.
Al Capp

He [Cassius Clay] became a Black Muslim, which is a pseudo-religion for unbright neurotics who feel the need to hate all white people.
William F. Buckley Jr.

Black people in America will never be free so long as they're on the white man's land...We can't be free until we get our own land and our own country in North America. When we separate from America and take maybe ten states, then we'll be free.
Muhammad Ali

America don't have no future! America's going to be destroyed! Allah's going to divinely chastise America! Violence, crimes, earthquakes-- there's gonna be all kinds of trouble. America's going to pay for all its lynchings and killings of slaves and what it's done to black people.
Muhammad Ali

The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race, and it alone, its ideologies and inventions, which eradicate autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.
Susan Sontag, Parisian Review

The new civil-rights orthodoxy now defines discrimination as whatever causes any differences in human circumstances.
Wall Street Journal editorial

One of the great difficulties of being a member of a minority race is that so many kind-hearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.
Langston Hughes

Those who are `pretended Indians,' with all their Indian heritage in their big toe, like to call themselves Native Americans. Real American Indians call themselves by their tribe, but they don't make a big thing of it.
Jeanette Henry, Cherokee Indian


Next Previous Top