Liberalism Quotes - Page 28

• Liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Drink, Communism

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• You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people's souls and thoughts.... Every step in that direction poisons the very roots of liberalism. It poisons political equality, free speech, free press, and equality of opportunity. It is the road not to more liberty but to less liberty.

  Herbert Hoover

  Opportunity, Government, Roots

  United States. President (1929-1933 : Hoover), Herbert Hoover, United States. Office of the Federal Register (1974). “Herbert Hoover: Containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the President”

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• When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, 'please lower my taxes.'

  Greg Gutfeld

  Dog, Selfish, Order

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• The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.

  Carl Schmitt

  Essence, Decision, Forever

  Carl Schmitt (2010). “Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty”, p.63, University of Chicago Press

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• One must never underestimate the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.

  Richard John Neuhaus

  Profound, Underestimate, Intolerance

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• A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.

  Jacques Barzun

  Men, Air, Feet

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• The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power ... Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favorable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood (Eisen und Blut).

  Otto von Bismarck

  Mistake, Blood, Iron

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• It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.

  Arthur H. Vandenberg

  Change, Wisdom, Opportunity

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• The victory of liberalism enables them to sue their victors.

  Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper

  History, Victory

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• iPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Technology, Ipods, Chinese

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• Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Wisdom, Men, Bags

  Benjamin Franklin (1839). “Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin”, p.11

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• Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

  Morris Raphael Cohen

  Travel, Adventure, Guarantees That

  Morris Raphael Cohen (1993). “The Faith of a Liberal”, p.438, Transaction Publishers

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• The Liberal Party abandoned the principles of reform and social liberalism and has become, instead, just another piece of political machinery in the service of corporatism.

  Eric Kierans

  Party, Political, Reform

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• If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Country, Heart

  Thomas Jefferson, H. A. Washington (2011). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private”, p.40, Cambridge University Press

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• A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.

  James Madison

  Wisdom, Mean, Government

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (1842). “The Federalist, on the New Constitution, Written in the Year 1788”, p.46

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• One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

  Walter Bagehot

  Art, Pain, Philosophy

  'Physics and Politics' (1872) 'The Age of Discussion'

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• An important aspect of the Eurasian worldview is an absolute denial of Western civilization. In the opinion of the Eurasians, the West with its ideology of liberalism is an absolute evil.

  Aleksandr Dugin

  Civilization, Evil, Important

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• It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Government, Democracy, Way

  "El Mercurio" Newspaper, 1981.

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• The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods,  are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.

  Samuel Adams

  Government, Ideas, Community

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• Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

  James Burnham

  Emotional, Glowing, Color

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• "Freedom" in capitalist countries exists only for those who possess money and who consequently hold power.

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Wisdom, Country, Politics

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• The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Politics, Input

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• The primary cause of disorder and lawlessness today, as throughout history, is the poverty of the many in contrast to the affluence of the few. But a new element of unrest has been added: a growing awareness that mass poverty is caused by defective institutions that prevent our harnessing the physical capabilities of science, engineering, management and labor to create general affluence; in other words, a growing awareness that poverty in any country that is or can be industrialized, is man's not nature's fault.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Country, Men

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• The poor lack money. They lack money because they do not know the secret of productive wealth. They know it is possible to be old, unemployed, uneducated, lazy - even halt, deaf, dumb, and blind-and still be excessively rich. But you have to be in on the secret, and the poor by definition are not.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Dumb, Secret

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• The political objective of universal capitalism is maximum individual autonomy, the separation of political power wielded by the holders of public office from economic power held by citizens, and the broad diffusion of privately owned economic power.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Office, Political

  Louis O. Kelso, Patricia Hetter Kelso (1967). “Two-factor Theory: the Economics of Reality; how to Turn Eighty Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, and Other Proposals”, New York : Vintage Books

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