William J. Casey Quotes

A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head.

Someone, I don't know who- it might have even been me- said, Any man at the age of twenty-five who is not a Communist has no heart: any man who is still is at the age of thirty-five has no head.

One of the wiser clichés of the 20th century stated that if you aren’t a Communist before you are 21, there is something wrong with your heart. If you remain one after you are 21, there is something wrong with your head.

I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas.

Any type of political ideology is going to have a lot of different variants of it.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

Anyone who is not a liberal in his youth has no heart. Anyone who remains so as he matures has no brain!

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

The idea that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me to be ludicrous. Philosophy is not that important to politics.

Politics hasn't changed, but I've changed.

To be conservative at 20 is heartless and to be a liberal at 60 is plain idiocy.

I analyze people's ideology, and I know leftists and liberals like the back of my hand.

If a man is right, he can't be too radical; if he is wrong, he can't be too conservative.

Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

A radical is one of whom people say ''He goes too far.'' A conservative, on the other hand, is one who ''doesn't go far enough.'' Then there is the reactionary, ''one who doesn't go at all.'' All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have

Ideology has consequences.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it.

My father was an ardent socialist for many years.

There's something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

I - you know, I loved politics more as a younger man.

No one wants to hear my perspective on politics, but I think honestly as you get older, you get more interested in it.

To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.