Top 75 Liberalism Quotes

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

The Obama presidency, and liberalism in general, are based on not trusting the American people – a belief that big government is better for people.

Liberalism is assisting quality of life, whatever you may choose.

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’

I used to have a phrase: Liberalism is spreading misery equally. And now the ruling class throughout Washington seems to have adopted this.

In India, it is not a contradiction for religion and liberalism to co-exist.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics.

Liberalism has never been about establishing a universal standard. Liberalism is simply intellectual cover for those wanting to gain political power and increase the size of the state.

Now, there’s a desire for order, authority coming from a feeling that society has gone too far to the side of individualism and liberalism.

Liberalism, above all, means emancipation – emancipation from one’s fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty.

Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

The liberalism I was taught was you’re supposed to accept everyone. Why shouldn’t the people in Fort Wayne, Ind., get their side on NBC News?

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy – that’s what the Democratic party ought to reach for.

But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he’s brilliant at. He can’t still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.

Liberalism will beat totalitarianism by killing it softly, not by mimicking it.

To think that the heritage of the West, including post-war liberalism, was a selfish, secular, practical arrangement of politics is a fiction.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not.

What does it say about a president’s policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record? What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us, time and again?

Liberalism is a cancer; it’s a forest fire; it destroys every single thing it touches.

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.

We are all living in a world shaped by Reagan and his ideology of small ‘l’ liberalism.

I’m a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.

Harvey Weinstein does not personify American liberalism any more than Bill O’Reilly personifies American conservatism.

Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

The chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberalism’… at every point, the two movements are in direct opposition.

When the forces of liberalism and capitalism converge, change happens.

Liberals shouldn’t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what’s liberalism about?

My objection to Liberalism is this that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind namely, politics of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.

Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.

Liberalism is financed by the dividends from Conservatism.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life.

America faces a fundamental choice: either the blessings of liberty or the servitude of liberalism. In the political struggle for survival, one or the other is headed for extinction.

Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.

If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

Modern political liberalism, particularly its racial orthodoxy, is the science of excuse-making, the training of black minds for failure.

The independence of the economic sphere was a tenet of faith with Liberalism.

Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts.

Conserving the individual is the basis of conservatism. It is classical, de Tocqueville liberalism.

If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it’s the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity. Promoting social mobility is one of the keys to that.

I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is part of the way that the country is governed and the country is shaped that induces spasms of populism, including spasms of bigoted populism.

Classical liberalism is the idea that individual freedom and limited government are the best way for humans to form a free society.

In the winter of 1940, ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college’s top essay and poetry prizes, to write about ‘the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.’

Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.

Liberalism isn’t change. It has to be imposed.

Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.

To me, the failure of liberalism – the tradition I come from – was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom.

That’s what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it’s fair, because people would be the best if they weren’t discriminated against.

Liberalism has consequences. It has never worked, folks! It has never worked. And it has never fulfilled its promise.

You don’t hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn’t be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.