quotations about liberals
Liberals are the greatest proponents of reason.
BILL BRANYON
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Liberating Liberals
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In a column a few weeks ago, I offered "a confession of liberal intolerance," criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses -- except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians. As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don't look like us, as long as they think like us. It's rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
"The Liberal Blind Spot", New York Times, May 28, 2016
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The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.
RONALD REAGAN
televised speech, Oct. 27, 1964
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The Liberals are the flying saucers of politics. No one can make head nor tail of them and they never are seen twice in the same place.
JOHN G. DIEFENBAKER
speech, May 5, 1962
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The word liberal has been employed as the political equivalent of an untreatable but potentially containable social disease -- the kind that could be contracted merely by going to a foreign movie or ordering a decaf latte, or worse, a glass of French wine.
ERIC ALTERMAN
Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America
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A liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realize its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats.
ISAIAH BERLIN
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
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But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.
BIBLE
Isaiah 32:8
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I think it's one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million can be made into a productive citizen. I'm realist enough to believe this can't be. We're always going to have our prisons, we're always going to have our places of preventative detention for psychopaths, and we're always going to have a certain number of people in our community who have no desire to achieve or who have no desire to even fit in an amicable way with the rest of society. And these people should be separated from the community, not in a callous way but they should be separated as far as any idea that their opinions shall have any effect on the course we follow.
SPIRO AGNEW
The Washington Post, Jul. 2, 1970
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Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy.
SPIRO AGNEW
speech in Springfield, Illinois, Sep. 10, 1970
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The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Have We Reached the End of History?
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Historically, liberalism is the political philosophy of individual liberty. It proclaims and insists that the individual is to be free to think, speak, and write as he wishes; to believe and worship as he wishes; and to peacefully live his life as he wishes.
RICHARD EBELING
"The Keys to Human Prosperity: Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law", Heartland Institute, June 1, 2016
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The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things -- war and hunger and date rape -- liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
P.J. O'ROURKE
Give War a Chance
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Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast -- give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun.
ERIC ALTERMAN
Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America
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What Americans call "liberalism" is the ideology of Western suicide.
JAMES BURNHAM
Suicide of the West
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The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building.
BENITO MUSSOLINI
speech in Milan, Italy, Oct. 6, 1922
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Nowadays, what is meant by "liberalism" is progressivism, socialism, the welfare state, statism; systems that American conservatives lump together as "Big Government."
JON N. HALL
"What's Wrong with Europe", American Thinker, June 1, 2016
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Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
MORT SAHL
attributed, Moments of Clarity
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Liberalism demands acceptance of our human differences and the ability to mediate them through democratic institutions. It demands acceptance of multiple, perhaps incompatible truths.
ROGER COHEN
"The Death of Liberalism", New York Times, April 24, 2016
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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
speech to House of Commons, Jun. 5, 1848
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Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas -- an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives.... Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.
MORRIS RAPHAEL COHEN
The Faith of a Liberal
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