Top 90 Conservatism Quotes

For a long time, New Orleans was the classic-rock station of American cuisine, its reputation for flamboyance belying its playlist conservatism.

I didn’t come up through the ranks of the conservative movement… I came to these revelations about my own personal politics in a realm in which those books, those ideas, the canon of conservatism, is nonexistent.

Few news stories can demonstrate the stark difference between conservatism and liberalism like the George Zimmerman trial has done.

Leaders should not just talk about – but walk the walk of – fiscal conservatism.

I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.

Conservatism is affecting the way women perceive who they are in the world.

Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments.

Conservatism to me is limited government, liberty and sticking to the Constitution and realizing that government is not the solution to almost anything, that your community, your family is the solution to everything.

I’m going to speak my mind. I’m going to defend conservatism as I understand it. I’m going to defend our ideas as the Republican Party.

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.

In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism’s problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

I’m trying to uphold what was true about conservatism. I consider myself a Reagan conservative.

If Theresa May is big enough to admit her mistakes and put a kinder Conservatism into the heart of her government, she may survive, reunite our broken country, and deliver a considerably better Brexit deal.

Alas, in 1929 came the Stock Market crash and everything changed and became worrisome. People started practicing conservatism because of financial losses, myself included.

I’m a conservative kind of person. I don’t think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.

Republicans today have given the country conservatism in the spirit of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance about the world, contempt for expertise, and raw appeals to white identity politics presaged Trump’s incendiary campaign.

NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative.

Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.

In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.

The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.

American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.

All socio-political phenomena in the U.K. come laden with the baggage of a class-based theory or two attached to them. In the case of gay Tories, there is one particularly silly variant of the category, which asserts that gayness is bred in public schools and thus fits with Conservatism like hand in glove.

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

Conservatism is the new counterculture.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

When Limbaugh entered the world of talk radio, the AM dial was essentially moribund. He turned it into a weapon for conservatism, and in the process, led the revolution that has ended in the disintegration of the old media monopoly.

As someone who has spent much of my life identifying as a conservative, I can’t stand what American conservatism has become.

I don’t think Trump is a conservative. I think he is a man without any fixed principles. And to the extent he does have any ideology, it owes far more to European-style National Front right-wing politics than to American conservatism.

Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.

The recent blind faith some Republicans have shown toward free trade actually represents more of an aberration than a hallmark of true American conservatism. It’s an anomaly that may well demand re-examination.

Surrounded by a sweltering state known for its staunch conservatism, Austin is an oasis. It’s home to the University of Texas, which continuously fosters a well-educated youth culture who have been funneling their collective creative energy into building a vibrant music, film, and technology scene for decades.

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.

I wholeheartedly believe that Andy Biggs is the right man to take up the legacy that Matt Salmon is leaving behind. I have worked with Andy for a number of years, and I have been impressed by his commitment to the Constitution and the principles of conservatism.

Few politicians did much to move the needle toward anything resembling gender equality, but it was President Nixon who first threw women under the political bus of Movement Conservatism.

Conservatism is not the problem. Conservatism is the founding of this country, essentially. Conservatism isn’t even really an ideology. Conservatism is just what is right, proper, decent, and moral. That’s all it is.

Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?

Paul Ryan is the gold standard for conservatism.

I met the president when he was president-elect at a meeting in Austin. He spoke of his faith. He spoke of his desire for a compassionate conservatism, for a faith-based initiative that would do something for poor people.

Because, you know, you’re in Utah. And because of its political conservatism, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

I think the Catholic faith is consistent with the kind of conservatism I believe in.

I believe I can carry the message of conservatism in a way that doesn’t seem so abrasive – that has better packaging, I would say, better messaging.

The future of Conservatism lies in our beliefs and values, not by throwing them away. We need to shed associations that bind us to past failures, but hold faith with those things that make us Conservatives.

I think one of the fundamental divides between progressivism and conservatism is conceit versus humility.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don’t know what they are conserving.

2016 is going to be a fight. A fight between conservatism and a Democrat Party that is undermining the very character of our nation.

What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good.

Conservatism accomplished a lot of its goals in the latter part of the 20th century. What does 21st-century conservatism look like?

The genteel conservatism of ‘Downton Abbey’ is not a rigid, extremist ideology whose adherents are bent on power at all costs.

The way that one feels about the story line of ‘Deterrence’ can tell us, I believe, about each person’s conservatism or liberalism and precisely how tolerant he or she is of racism.