Quotes · Skopia

17 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Conservatism✕clear

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

1884

★ 7.1

Speech · Political speech

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1936

★ 5.3

They are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

Margaret Thatcher

1987

★ 5.3

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

How to Be a Conservative · 2014

★ 5.1

Personal journal

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.

1897

★ 3.8

Essay · Political literature

The Conservatives…being by the law of their existence the stupidest party.

John Stuart Mill

Considerations on Representative Government · 1861

★ 3.7

Political literature

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

1960

★ 3.6

Essay · Magazine · Political literature

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

The New Yorker · 1970

★ 3.6

National Review... Stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

William F. Buckley

1955

★ 3.5

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

1985

★ 3.5

Political literature

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

In Place of Fear · 1952

★ 3.4

Speech · Political speech

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?

Abraham Lincoln

1860

★ 2.1

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Conservative · 1841

★ 2.0

Poem · Magazine

Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long.

1959

★ 1.9

Religious literature

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy · 1908

★ 1.9

Essay · Political literature

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Michael Oakeshott

On Being Conservative · 1962

★ 1.7

I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old.

1936

★ 1.0