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A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal.
-Proverb
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Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.
-Spiro T. Agnew
speech before Illinois Republican meeting, Springfield, Illinois, September 10, 1970
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There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.
-Roland Barthes
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A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
-Leonard Bernstein, "The New York Times", October 30, 1988
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The hard-core intentionalist expresses only the most remote concern for consequences - usually, some vague, distant utopia. But this is, in most cases, a rationalization. His real satisfaction comes from a sense of doing the right thing - even when right has, in his mind, no clear connection with reality.
http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosophicalissues/ethics/moralityofgood.html
-Robert James Bidinotto
essay: The Morality of Good Intentions, "The Freeman, A publication of The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.", March, 1987
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If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments -- we'd have the Ten Suggestions.
-Malcolm Bradbury
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The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.
-Lenny Bruce
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As with most liberal sexual ideas, what makes the world a better place for men invariably makes it a duller and more dangerous place for women.
-Julie Burchill
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The American insanity for Loving Everybody is ruining my good temper and delivering my stomach to enormous bouts with acidity.
-Taylor Caldwell
On Growing Up Tough chapter: Dolts and Love Cultists
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A liberal is man who will give away everything he doesn't own.
-Frank Dane
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My objection to Liberalism is this -- that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind -- namely, politics -- of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true
-John Fowles
The Magus
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A liberal man is too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.
-Robert Frost
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A liberal is a man who is willing to spend somebody else's money.
-Carter Glass
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Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.
-Alexander Herzen
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You just stood there screaming
Fearing no one was listening to you
They say the empty can rattles the most
The sound of your own voice must soothe you
Hearing only what you want to hear
And knowing only what you've heard
You, you're smothered in tragedy
And you're out to save the world.
-James Hetfield
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Liberalism, above all, means emancipation -- emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination... from poverty.
-Hubert Humphrey
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The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority
-Henrik Ibsen
Enemy of the People (p.117)
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I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.
-Norman Mailer
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The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.
-Margaret Mead
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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.
As cited in Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America by Gary LaFree 1998 : Moynihan is quoted in an article that appeared in Mickey Kaus, The Work Ethic State, The New Republic (1986) July 7:22-33, 23; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation: The Godkin Lectures (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Books about Liberalism
