Conservatives Quotes

“Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Let the liberal turn to the course of action, the course of all radicals, and the amused look vanishes from the face of society as it snarls, “That’s radical!” Society has good reason to fear the radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.”
― Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us. Society is stronger when we make vows to each other and we support each other. I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.”
― David Cameron

“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.”
― Robert Reich

“When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.”
― Robert Stacy McCain

“I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.”

In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive. (p. 6)”
― Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“People don’t adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. They tend to develop certain “characteristic adaptations” and “life narratives” that make them resonate—unconsciously and intuitively—with the grand narratives told by political movements on the left (such as the liberal progress narrative). People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right (such as the Reagan narrative).
Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix. I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality. In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.”
― Jeffrey Frank

“the biggest bubble that I participate in is Conservative Facebook. It's a world where whatever Trump says is gospel, any criticism is an obvious lie and all other perspectives are Marxist. All absolute positions with no room for discussion with memes used as a foundation of fact

(9/11/2020 on Twitter)”
― Mark Cuban

“He had an AM radio playing a conservative talk show. The host was making some very interesting statements about the president. I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but from what the man said, I had to believe that sometime in the recent past the laws regarding sedition must have changed.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dexter's Final Cut

“How convenient for those in power to have a labour force accustomed to disempowerment and willing to settle for less.”
― Sabba Khan, The Roles We Play

“It is well know that it is career suicide for any person in Hollywood to be explicitly conservative. If they share any perspective that pivots away from liberal orthodoxy, they are accused of racism and branded a nazi. If they are black, they are accused of insanity.”
― Candace Owens, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation

“L'imbecillità, si noti, non è né di destra né di sinistra. Vale per gli imbecilli ciò che scriveva il grande storico Carlo M. Cipolla nel suo intramontabile saggio intitolato "Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana": ovvero che gli stupidi si distribuiscono in modo uniforme in tutta la società, senza distinzioni di titolo scolastico, di professione o di reddito. Quindi anche l'imbecille si distribuisce equamente di qua e di là. Magari quelli di destra sono un po' più determinati e sbrigativi ma, se è per questo, quelli di sinistra sono assai più convinti delle proprie idee e, soprattutto, vorrebbero pure convincerti della superiore civiltà e del rigore morale dell'imbecille progressista.”
― Edmondo Berselli, Sinistrati: Storia sentimentale di una catastrofe politica

“Anyone forced to accept a worldview which they entirely rejected was not part of a democracy but, rather, a tyranny. They were being held hostage by their ideological opponents. They were not free citizens. They inevitably saw the elected government as an enemy, not as the body sworn to represent and uphold their interests. When the one-nation democratic ideal – with the government serving the entire nation – was replaced by a two-nation democracy, whereby a government did not serve the nation but only its own supporters and own base, thus alienating those that didn’t support it and rendering them the enemy, it had ceased to be a democracy. Partisan government was a dictatorship by one part of the nation over the other part, not a reflection of democracy, and not any kind of consensual system. Everyone not represented by the government had the right to seek its overthrow. Such a government did not represent the general will of the people, the only means for it to be regarded as legitimate, but instead represented the particular will of one partisan group of the people, committed to an extremist ideology abhorrent to its opponents. To save America from dictatorship, to save democracy, AOC said that it was necessary to divide America into two houses, liberal and conservative, and each would then go its own way, free forever of the oppression of the other. She stressed over and over again that if the gap between liberals and conservatives were small, if it were easy to switch between the two positions, then democracy could function. However, once conservatives and liberals became fanatical ideological enemies, with virtually no one ever likely to swap sides, then democracy was unworkable.”
― Adam Nostra, The 2044 War Between Texas and California: How AOC Became the World Leader

“Doug Kenny was not primarily funny. Doug was primarily smart. And there's such a thing as being too damn smart.
In order to make sense of life, it's necessary to be oblivious to a lot of things or to ignore them or to twist them around so they fit with your perceptions of everything else. Doug was unable to do this. He saw too vividly and understood too acutely everything that happened around him, everything that happened to him, and everything that he caused to happen. Existence is grotesque. Doug had no blind eye to turn to it.”
― P J O'Rourke

“Freed from the need to appeal to the median voter, Republicans have hewed to a more conservative and confrontational path than the country would prefer. They have learned to win power by winning land, rather than by winning hearts and minds.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Conservatives were choosing, again and again, the path of maximum confrontation and disruption, rallying behind the voices that promised to go where their predecessors hadn't, to speak the words that had previously been whispered, to embrace the tactics that had once been shunned. Trump wasn't a break with this Republican Party. He was the most authentic expression of its modern psychology.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Aggressive, overreaching wealth redistribution *does* happen in the United States, it just happens in the opposite direction conservatives scream about: our system takes money away from everyday people and siphons it towards the profanely wealthy.

(9/16/2020 on Twitter)”
― Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“Amazing how quickly those thin blue line flags turned into weapons against the police, almost like the only true ideological commitment is to white supremacy & literally nothing else

(1/6/2021 on Twitter)”
― Bree Newsome Bass

“Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George W. Bush reached out to Latino voters by showing a familiarity with their language and history, emphasizing the values of diversity and inclusion. Depicting Latinos as a distinct and valuable part of America’s democratic mosaic, conservative multiculturalism connected Latino culture to Republican values, emphasizing conservative approaches to faith, patriotism and the traditional family.

Trump, by contrast, knows nothing of the history of Latinos in the United States and rarely even pretends to find value in Latinos’ distinct identities. Rather than offering his non-White voters recognition, Trump has offered them multiracial whiteness.”
― Cristina Beltrán

“And I've noticed that the people in the ultraconservative extremist right, right now, have built a new metanarrative around America. And it started with the rise of the election of Donald Trump. But that metanarrative was anyone who does not see strength in America is weak. Anyone who opposes us is an enemy. Anyone who gets in our way will be trampled. We will not govern as a nation of equals. We will govern over and rule over people. Democracy is losing the metanarrative story.”
― Malcolm W. Nance