Rick Perlstein Quotes

As an ideology - and certainly as a political identity - conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for.

The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.

As someone who has spent much of my life identifying as a conservative, I can't stand what American conservatism has become.

The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.

Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.

There are some liberals eager to embrace a culture void of morals, but the majority of America is made up of honest, hard-working families who turned out in droves to protect the traditional way of life.

I'm humbled to follow in the footsteps of Ed Feulner, who built the most important conservative institution in the nation. He has been a friend and mentor for years and I am honored to carry on his legacy of fighting for freedom.

I want you to answer this question: Why should you settle for anything less than an authentic conservative who will fight for your views and values without an apology? Think about that.

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all.

I entered Yale in the fall of 1951, and about November of that year, Bill Buckley published 'God and Man at Yale.'

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.

Conservative politics are not an a la carte menu.

Following the pattern of right-wing philosophizing, he [Barry Goldwater] proves his points by quoting 18th-Century Americans, 19th-Century Englishmen, and 20th-Century Communists.

Jerry Falwell is the most dangerous man in America

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather.

You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.

The bottom line is, there're a lot of conservatives that don't feel Donald Trump is conservative, right? Or, he's not their brand of conservatism... and there's a lot of people who don't have a seat on the inside who used to have a seat on the inside.

In terms of the conservative movement, I do think it would be foolish to deny that Trump has exposed certain aspects of that movement as less healthy than I thought or hoped.

Movement Conservatism was a fringe force from the 1950s until the 1980s, when voters elected Movement Conservative Ronald Reagan to the White House. But even then, their control of the Republican Party was not a given.

What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.