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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Mark Twain2 quotes
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. — Mark Twain · 1884The 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 · 1897Abraham Lincoln1 quote
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? — Abraham Lincoln · 1860Aneurin Bevan1 quote
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. — Aneurin Bevan · 1952Daniel Patrick Moynihan1 quote
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 · 1985Franklin D. Roosevelt1 quote
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 · 1936G.K. Chesterton1 quote
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 · 1908Gerald Ford1 quote
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. — Gerald Ford · 1960Hannah Arendt1 quote
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. — Hannah Arendt · 1970John Stuart Mill1 quote
The Conservatives…being by the law of their existence the stupidest party. — John Stuart Mill · 1861Margaret Thatcher1 quote
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 · 1987Michael Oakeshott1 quote
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 · 1962Ogden Nash1 quote
Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long. — Ogden Nash · 1959Ralph Waldo Emerson1 quote
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841Robert Frost1 quote
I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old. — Robert Frost · 1936Roger Scruton1 quote
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. — Roger Scruton · 2014William F. Buckley1 quote
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