The Conservatarian Manifesto Quotes

“When progressives argue that the Constitution belongs to another era, they are effectively contending that mankind has evolved beyond error and greed, and that the precautions taken by America’s careful revolutionaries are no longer necessary.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“The hard-fought victories in America's checkered history were won neither with parchment nor with words, but with guns, with blood, and with unimaginable suffering. Slavery, like Nazism and other totalitarian horrors, was vanquished by flying steel, by heartbreak, and by brute force—by whites and blacks who together smashed the institutions that had hijacked American liberty and perverted it for their own profit. But triggers are ultimately pulled by men, and successful campaigns require their practitioners to carry with them more than merely bombs and water. 'Europe was created by history,' Margaret Thatcher liked to say, but 'America was created by philosophy.' That philosophy, established by the founding generation and routinely recruited by the excluded ever since, remains extraordinarily potent—a North Star for wandering discontents within America's borders and without.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“To propose earnestly in any of those places that individuals should be permitted to own military-grade firearms, that the established educational system is an authoritarian disaster, and that the answer to what ails America is a return to a thriving and diverse localism is, invariably, to be met with raised eyebrows.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Just as crucial as ensuring that the United States does not mistake the keeping of order for nation building is ensuring that the military is not permitted to get away with a carte blanche approach to spending and management that would be humored in no other part of the government.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Roughly one of three college graduates is in jobs the Labor Department says require less than a bachelor’s degree.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“So often what is really nothing short of a power grab is cast in the lofty language of 'progress.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“The primary weakness of conservatism is that, relying as it does on the Burkean presumption that society is the way it is for a reason, it can refuse too steadfastly to adapt to emerging social and economic realities and it is apt to transmute solutions that were the utilitarian product of a particular time into articles of high principle.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“The primary weakness of libertarianism is that it can become unreasonably ideological and unmoored from reality. At their very worst, libertarians can behave like Jacobins: disrespectful of tradition, convinced that logic-on-paper can answer all the important questions about the human experience, dismissive of history and cultural norms, possessed of a purifying instinct, and all too ready to pull down institutions that they fail to recognize are vital to the integrity of the society in which they wish to operate.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“That in America the friends of liberty are called “conservatives” and the centralizing authoritarians are referred to as “liberals” is one of the great semantic jokes of history.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“the Right recognizes that endorsing the right to do something is a separate thing from endorsing how that right is used; as a rule, the Left does not.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Every generation considers itself to be smarter than the ones that went before, and every generation is wrong.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future