Andrew Breitbart Quotes

There isn't a day when I don't look in the mirror and think, 'How in the hell did I become a conservative Republican?' It's still a weird reckoning, because it shouldn't have happened.

I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.

Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.

It is one of the truisms of politics that a conservative is often enough a former liberal who has been 'mugged by reality.'

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.

I was a Democrat for a period of time early on. And then I was also an independent. And then I became a Republican.

I was a right winger into the 70's but I left the right in late 70's.

A conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before.

Let's trace the birth of an idea. It's born as rampant radicalism, then it becomes progressivism, then liberalism, then it becomes moderated conservative, outmoded, and gone.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

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

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

I was a Republican before Donald Trump was a Republican. I was a Republican when Donald Trump was a Democrat. I was a Republican when Donald Trump was an independent. And I'm going to be a Republican when Donald Trump gets tired of being a Republican.

I am a conservative Republican, but I didn't start out that way. I was raised as a Democrat.

I like to say now that the reason I'm conservative is because I used to be a liberal, and I learned a lot.

Well for sure I'm conservative.

Conservatism accomplished a lot of its goals in the latter part of the 20th century. What does 21st-century conservatism look like?

I think that conservatism as we understand it is coming under great strain during the era of Trump.

I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant; individual responsibility and community. I do not see those as being mutually inconsistent.

American Conservatism is finished, and its remaining adherents are, whether they know it or not, merely ghosts wandering, mazed, in the daylight.

There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision - global democratic revolution - into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

There's Lindsey Graham 1.0 and then there's Lindsey Graham 2.0. I could not beat Lindsey Graham 1.0. That was the John McCain-Lindsey Graham.

For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.

Ah yes! Conservatives. Some of the finest minds of the 12th Century.