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.
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