Liberalism Quotes - Page 3

More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity. Liberals believe in equality of outcome.

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

Democracy, liberalism--those are just words on a signpost, she was right about that. But the reality is more like the microflora in your guts. In the West, all your microbes balance each other out, it's taken centuries for you to reach that stage. They all quietly get on with generating hydrogen sulphide and keep their mouths shut. Everything's fine-tuned, like a watch, the total balance and self-regulation of the digestive system, and above it--the corporate media, moistening it all with fresh saliva every day. That kind of organism is called the open society--why the hell should it close down, it can close down anyone else it wants with a couple of air strikes. The question is, how do you arrive at this condition? What they taught us to do was to swallow salmonella with no antibodies to fight it, or other microbes to keep it in check at all. Not surprisingly we developed such a bad case of diarrhea that three hundred billion bucks had drained out before we even began to understand what was going on.

A bunch of Latinas at Pitzer College decided to let white girls know that they shouldn’t wear hoops anymore, because that’s appropriating a style.... I’ve never worn hoop earrings for the purpose of “feeling ethnic,” nor have I ever associated hoop earrings with a certain culture. They’ve always been an accessory I like. It’s really as simple as that....I can’t wear hoops because I didn’t “create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalization”? I can’t wear hoops because I’m not a feminist? I can’t wear hoops because some Latinas can’t afford it? I can’t wear hoops because I refuse to buy into your hypersensitive BS?....Does anyone else realize how completely ridiculous that sounds?

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.

It is not the job of the media to try to skew events but to report on events honestly. Anything else is journalistic malpractice.

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

A study of the San Francisco Beat enclave by psychiatrist Dr. Francis Rigney in the late 1950's showed 60 percent "were so psychotic or crippled by tensions, anxiety and neurosis as to be nonfunctional in the competitive world." In contrast, the several studies released so far made of the student radicals at Berkeley show them to be stable, serious, and of above-average intelligence. The point is that the Beats had to "cop out" of the Rat Race because they couldn't perform; the New Left chooses to reject a society it could easily be successful in.

There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

The prevalence of anti-patriotic attitudes among liberal intellectuals led some of them to warn their fellow liberals of the consequences of such attitudes for the future not of America but of American liberalism. Most Americans, as the American public philosopher Richard Rorty has written, take pride in their country, but 'many of the exceptions to this rule are found in colleges and universities, in the academic departments that have become sanctuaries for left-wing political views.' These leftists have done 'a great deal of good for . . . women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. . . . But there is a problem with this Left: it is unpatriotic. It repudiates the idea of a national identity and the emotion of national pride.' If the Left is to retain influence, it must recognize that a 'sense of shared national identity . . . is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.' Without patriotism, the Left will be unable to achieve its goals for America. Liberals, in short, must use patriotism as a means to achieve liberal goals

I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement, especially walking behind it.

Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.

There is this common notion that young conservatives are the few, that most people had liberal worldviews when they were young. If this is true, then it is with great irony that a number of old liberals must never had progressed into conservatives as they grew older.

We want to believe something very similar about racism and accusations of racism. If we can prove that a particular allegation of racism is unfounded or untrue, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief and try to move on. That is part of racism's power. It tricks us into thinking that we can wish it away with a string of logical premises and conclusions, with a singular decree of guilt or innocence. We fantasize about isolating this thing and determining its measurable impact once and for all, especially now that blatant forms of racism have been so thoroughly demonized in mainstream society.

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

empathy is more powerful than sympathy

[T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

When, thirty-five years ago, I tried to give a summary of the ideas and principles of that social philosophy that was once known under the name of liberalism, I did not indulge in the vain hope that my account would prevent the impending catastrophes to which the policies adopted by the European nations were manifestly leading. All I wanted to achieve was to offer to the small minority of thoughtful people an opportunity to learn something about the aims of classical liberalism and its achievements and thus to pave the way for a resurrection of the spirit of freedom after the coming debacle.

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.

The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.

Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas.Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it.Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.

My last penny! I think I'll squander it on myself. I never feel badly about spending money my dad has earned honestly! I can't decide whether I should buy a balloon or a gumball. A gumball would taste mighty good, but a balloon would be a lot more fun... I'll take a balloon! Sooner or later in life a person has to learn to make decisions! (Sees someone with a different color balloon) Gee, I wish I'd bought a RED balloon.

Has society really become quite thin-skinned, or is acting “offended” a new tactic that is being used to shut down legitimate political debate? Progressives are increasingly claiming to be offended whenever those on the right disagree with their left-wing positions. It doesn't matter what the issue is; the left will divert a legitimate political debate into an accusation that the right disagrees with them because they are full of hate towards them.

This is a woman who didn’t want her viewpoints challenged, nor to see the views of the half of the world that comprises men. Her assumption is that all male authors are sexist and that their books distort the views of women....that’s bigoted and despicable: the form of feminism that sees men as the enemy from the outset, and seeks to reinforce that prejudice by reading only books that keep her in her safe space.....The future, in both life and books, is men and women together, with a mutual understanding that can come only from learning about each other’s thoughts. [About Caitlin Moran's sexist statement that girls shouldn't read any books written by men.]

The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal.

When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a biological attribute, and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression....I most certainly don't see myself as a victim.

Equality has no place for genius.

In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.

The sage of Nazareth may satisfy those who have never faced the problem of evil in their own lives; but to talk about an ideal to those who are under the thralldom of sin is a cruel mockery. Yet if Jesus was merely a man like the rest of men, then an ideal is all that we have in Him. Far more is needed by a sinful world. It is small comfort to be told that there was goodness in the world, when what we need is goodness triumphant over sin. But goodness triumphant over sin involves an entrance of the creative power of God, and that creative power of God is manifested by the miracles. Without the miracles, the New Testament might be easier to believe. But the thing that would be believed would be entirely different from