Edwin Feulner Quotes

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

The conservative movement was told to curl up in a fetal position and just stay there for the next eight years, thank you very much. Well, how things have changed.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

I thought I could do something different from any Conservative prime minister before me. But I couldn't.

The great value of the two party system is that after the progressive party has taken a step forward in the face of agonized yells, the conservatives come in and—true to their platform—change nothing at all. Such is the way dangerous innovations turn into glorious traditions.

The voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve.

I used to think that James Kilpatrick and Barry Goldwater were really conservative, but now we’ve got people to the right of them. They want to use government to be punitive.

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

The reformer does not want to move left; he wants to move forward.

By tradition the Conservatives are, as the name shows, the party of laissez-faire, the opponents of change, the 'go-slows.' The Liberals are the party of change, the 'go-quicks.'

No government of which I am a member will ever be a government of reaction.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.

Some want to rebrand the GOP, but they will never rebrand conservatives.

There’s something deeply cultural about changing parties …. radio announcers and journalists can change either newspaper or radio or television stations and footballers can change teams, but there seems to be a deeper cultural thing about the notion of [political] defection, even if you haven’t changed your values along the way.

You cannot just change regimes; you have to change mindsets.

Goldwater and his crowd tell me that they’ll forgive you for anything except being weak.

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

'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.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.

The period of radical reform is finished.

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.