Slavery didn’t break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.
I must have read every issue of ‘Punch’ published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like ‘Three Men in a Boat.’
A reforming liberal leader in Russia is the Holy Grail of Kremlinology, but the search for one is as misguided and hopeless as that for the relic of the Last Supper.
I wish that Iraq had not happened – and that we had not lost touch with so many of our natural supporters. But this should have provided an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats as a party. Yet their protest gains are now diminishing.
MoveOn loves government. It remains enamored of government spending as fuel for its liberal agenda; and anything that threatens to close that spigot in any degree is perceived as a dire threat – worthy of Chicken-Little warnings that the sky is going to fall.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.
I believe there are millions of people across the country who are crying out for someone to stand up for liberal values.
It seems to me that in our lifetime we have passed from the wreck of liberal humanism to the beginning of a new recognition of dogma: isn’t it rather tremendous?
Seattle is this curious liberal ‘island.’
Most people in this country are very fair-minded; they understand we’re in the middle of a very difficult journey of repairing, rescuing, restoring our British economy, and they want us, and they want particularly Liberal Democrats in government, to fight for the fairest possible way of doing that.
Every white liberal straight man needs to take action and work at unifying all peoples of our sides and stop making women and people of color and the LGBT community fight it out themselves and just pat them on the back. We have to take active roles in supporting them, defending them, and hiring them.
The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy.
The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.
‘Free markets’ is not a liberal or conservative issue. The rule of law is not a Right or Left issue. Those are American principles since our founding, and to the extent that other countries follow our lead… they will prosper. That’s what I want, because every one of those people is a child of God.
Until defense of democracy in the digital era is taken up by governments collectively, both in NATO and outside the alliance, liberal democracies will remain vulnerable to the cyberthreats of the 21st century.
A loyal liberal can get away with anything with other liberals, as long as that loyal liberal is liberal and attacks conservatives left and right, spouts the right words, they get away with anything.
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
The hour of the liberal interventionists like Hillary Clinton in Libya, like the neocons’ hour of power in the GOP, is over.
The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.
China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past.
I might not understand everything a Democrat or liberal thinks but hey let’s be honest, I don’t understand some of the things the Republicans think, but that doesn’t make me some dumb hick that doesn’t have the right to live here.
When political figures are shown on television or in movies, it’s always the liberal Democrats that are shown to be humane, caring people.
Too many countries that do not play by the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization – including, notably mercantilist China and monopolist Saudi Arabia – have been allowed in, to the detriment of both the WTO and the liberal trading environment it is supposed to sponsor.
While the liberal media elite depict the bowler as a chubby guy with a comb-over and polyester pants, the reality is that bowling is one of the most tech-heavy sports today. Robotic pinsetters and computerized scoring were just the beginning.
I’m a huge fan of the liberal arts approach of teaching you to think, analyze, and communicate, then sending you out into the world to cause trouble.
I suspect that even today, with all the progress we have made in liberal thought, the quality of true tolerance is as rare as the quality of mercy.
The Conservative Party is not honouring the commitment to Lords reform and, as a result, part of our contract has now been broken. Clearly I cannot permit a situation where Conservative rebels can pick and choose the parts of the contract they like, while Liberal Democrat MPs are bound to the entire agreement.
Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, whether you are a liberal or a conservative, we know that neither this President nor prior Presidents of both parties did everything right or we would not have had a 9/11.
Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people’s points of view – these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can’t allow them to delude us to the point where we can’t recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people’s exploits.
I’m not terribly focused on whether I even could ever become the Leader of the Liberal Party or the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party in the future.
Americans are probably more in line than ever before. We’re more moderate than we are liberal or conservative.
These social platforms are all invented by very liberal people on the West and East Coast, and we figure out how to use it to push conservative values. I don’t think they ever thought that would happen.
I think if you live in London, it’s such a cosmopolitan city; nobody even notices different-race relationships. I assumed it would be even more liberal in the States, and it’s totally the opposite.
It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible.
At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
My grandparents used to pray five times a day, but they were quiet about their own thing. Completely liberal day by day; my grandmother was a social worker and my grandfather was an engineer, but they never talked about religion. My entire life I couldn’t remember one conversation I had with them about religion.
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that liberal democracies, with their political freedom and economic success, have three important pillars: a strong government, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. I would add a fourth: free markets.
Maybe it’s due to my west coast liberal upbringing, but, the idea of parallel universes doesn’t strike me as being too far out there.
Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.
Ultimately, it’s not our responsibility to turn Afghanistan into a 21st-century, vibrant, economic, liberal democracy with a little L. Our responsibility is to keep Americans safe, to make sure we don’t have a failed state in a region. It’s not our responsibility to reconstruct Afghanistan.
The ur-conservatives of the 1950s – William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest – were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
‘Solutionism’ for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection – by means of technology – without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.
The primary school I attended in Shanghai was a very liberal one, established by scholars who had return from an education in France. The children of leading families were enrolled there, including the son of a well-known man believed to be a top gangster of the underworld!
My upbringing was completely liberal from the start. In fact, I didn’t even have a Muslim identity.
I see myself as a small ‘l’ liberal, but not coalition liberal, necessarily.
What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as ‘liberal democracy,’ ‘free markets’ and ‘Europe’ with suspicion.
I was raised in Montreal, which is very multicultural, very liberal. Then I moved to New York.
