Conservatism Quotes

All reactionaries are paper tigers.

Mao Zedong

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

Christopher Hitchens

We hear the haunting presentiment of a dutiful middle age in the current reluctance of young people to select any option except the one they feel will impinge upon them the least.

Gail Sheehy

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who has never learned to walk.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Ambrose Bierce

What is conservatism? It is not adherence to the old and tried, but against the new and untried?

Abraham Lincoln

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

Henry Kissinger

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.

Mark Twain

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain

The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

Robertson Davies

Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.

Kin Hubbard

I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

John Maynard Keynes