Ian Hampshire-Monk Quotes

The Tea Party people are ideologues. They are right, and no one can change their minds. There is no reason for compromise.

Terror … is often the result of giving politics a sacred, absolute dimension.

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

There are voices in the Republican Party today who preach pragmatism, who champion conciliation, who counsel compromise. I stand here today to reject those deceptions.

There is a segment of the right that doesn't care about winning, what I call zealotry masquerading as principle.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

People at the political extremes have an advantage over the rest of us. Only they seem to know exactly who and what is wrong with America and precisely what policies and programs should be adopted to fix it.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

We must stop the Tea Party before the United States Senate falls into the hands of extremists and ideologues who leave no room for reason or compromise, who don't recognize common ground even when they're standing on it.

Radical politics tend to be simple minded.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

The right hand doesn’t know what the far right hand is doing.

I never dared be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess commitment to some special or constricting idea.

In truth, the parties of Whig [Liberal] and Tory [Conservative] are those of nature. They exist in all countries, whether called by these names, or by those of Aristocrats and Democrats, Cote Droite and Cote Gauche, Ultras and Radicals, Serviles, and Liberals.

What if you are a conservative in a liberal environment? Then what you are conserving is liberalism.

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives.

The liberals of both the Democratic and Republican Parties are the instruments of Satan to destroy the former great principles of these two political parties.

All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

The best position the government could assume would be that of moderation between opposite extremes of Ultra-Toryism and Radicalism

I was raised a Republican but I don’t recognize a once proud party that has been hijacked by extremists who are driving it off the flat earth that they pretend we are living on.

… contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.