Alan Colmes Quotes

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.

I don't trust liberals, I trust conservatives.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?

Liberal institutions soon cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established.

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them.... In every country these two parties exist.... Call them, therefore, liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same party still and pursue the same object.

It's very easy for liberals and conservatives to agree upon liberty, but it is harder for them to agree upon equality.

If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.

Conservatives read books and liberals don’t.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

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.

As usual, the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.

America has had gifted conservative statesmen. But, with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.

Everybody in Mariposa is neither liberal or conservative or else is both.

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

On my conservative days I’m a Democrat.

I am not nor ever have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.

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 conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

The current attitude is pretty much the attitude we had in the CIA during the 1950s. When we analysed the operational climate and all the political forces in any given country, we had our friends and we had our enemies. There was no one in between. The friends were centre and Right wing social democrats, conservatives, liberals, in some cases all the way over to neo-fascists. The enemies were Left wing social democrats, socialists, Communists, all the way to those advocating armed struggle.

Today, the culture wars and the constant skirmishes over the size and scope of the welfare state have convinced conservatives that the country’s direst enemies are not “subversive” foreigners, but homegrown liberals.

We will have a government where liberals will stay in power until they get radical and conservatives will have the power until they get reactionary.

How did the progressive Republican Party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower become the reactionary party of Ronald Reagan, the tea party and Paul Ryan? There is nothing random about these ideological shifts. They reflect the party’s — and the nation’s — central unresolved problem: the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of private property.

Liberal hypocrites like Mr. Weinstein were a big reason 63 million Americans voted for a conservative hypocrite like Mr. Trump.

I like to discuss things. I am open: I like to discuss with liberals better than I do with conservatives.