Ramsay Traquair Quotes

Center-right parties have embraced or absorbed many of the ideas of socialism: trade unions, generous welfare benefits, some form of nationalized health care, even restrictions on carbon emissions. The right argues that it can manage all these programs more efficiently than the left, and some want to shrink them, but only on the fringes is there talk of actually dismantling the welfare state.

Well, in the past, the size of government was one of the more fundamental dividing lines between Right and Left. The Right was supposed to represent the small government philosophy - limited spending, low taxes. Obviously, things have shifted.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

Have the government get out of the way.

The Kochs, like many other hard-right conservatives, redefine "socialism" as almost any form of government which taxes citizens and regulates businesses.

Except in certain enclaves of absurdity and irrelevance, such as the universities and the Public Broadcasting System, virtually no one in the world believes any more that there is a system preferable to ours: more benign, more equitable, more productive. Another way many people liked to refer to what we were doing was waging "a battle of ideas." That battle, at least among serious people, is now over. We have won it.... [I]t is the sight of these stricken, homeless orphans of the Left that convinces us that our work in this Committee has been successfully concluded.

'Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

Conservatives believe that some problems have no solution, that they can only be mitigated at best. Liberals believe that most every problem has a government solution.

Europe’s conservative parties, like Republicans in the United States, have for the most part, turned into shrill apostles of austerity at almost any social cost.

I am a Reagan Republican: I believe in Free Market Capitalism; I believe in economic growth.

Since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office promising to scale back the federal government, Republican leaders have promised to cut regulation and taxes, and to return power to individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. But they have never entirely managed to eradicate the New Deal government.

Conservatives brayed that government should stay out of the private sector; liberals bleated for nationalizing the banks.

The media has brainwashed the electorate to expect the government to do something. The best economic policy of any government is to do nothing but reduce the size of the government, reduce the size of the laws, and reduce the size of regulations.

Conservatives want smaller government. They want to focus on market-based solutions wherever one can. They want to have as little regulation as possible. But in general, they recognize that government must play an important role for a society to operate.

It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.

I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative.

I am a free market Republican. I am against subsidies, in most cases.

Less government, less regulation, lower taxes.

So all the system was running down and collapsing. Mrs. Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, and she clearly wanted to strike out and do something different.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals.

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.

I'm a confirmed Libertarian. I believe that the principal difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats just want to grow our Imperial Federal Government a bit faster than the Republicans do.

The role of a conservative is not to pass laws but to repeal them.