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When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
-Ambrose Bierce
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All great peoples are conservative.
-Thomas Carlyle
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There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots.
-Stephen Carter
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A conservative is a fellow who thinks a rich man should have a square deal.
-Frank Dane
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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
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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
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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
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It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people
-Friedrich A. Hayek
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Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals.
-Senator Jesse Helms
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Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.
-Kin Hubbard
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I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
-John Maynard Keynes
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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
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The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.
-Gerda Lerner
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What is conservatism? It is not adherence to the old and tried, but against the new and untried?
-Abraham Lincoln
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory -- to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
-Walter Lippmann
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Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
-John Stuart Mill
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A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who has never learned to walk.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.
-Harold Rosenberg
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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
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The word conservative is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.
-Norman Tebbit
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That man's the true Conservative who lops the moldered branch away.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
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Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.
-Mark Twain
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The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
-Mark Twain
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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
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Books about Conservatism
