James MacGregor Burns Quotes

I happen to agree with many of the liberal emphasis on compassion, justice and equality. I just disagree that it's the government's role to provide everything.

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

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.

Principles which united American liberals for generations, now divide me from some who seek equality of result and who sanction the preferences imposed by government to attain it.

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.

We’ve taken care not to penalize the wealthy but we have to redistribute some income …It is through reform that we can obtain fairness in the modern world…A reformed welfare state is the only way to obtain social justice.

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.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.

Unless we labor to help others achieve a reasonable stake in society, we may find ourselves losing the society in which we have too great a stake.

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

In every society liberals are not very popular. Liberalism is not a populist movement.

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist…. no one since Thomas Jefferson ... has really believed it.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

Liberty and equality are not only destructive to the morals, but to the happiness of society.

Liberals are the enemy of ordinary Americans!

Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist

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.

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative

A lot of the differences between left and right now are differences about the liberal welfare state, about a set of institutions established in America in the middle of the 20th century … that exist in pursuit of an egalitarian ideal.

All men are born free. Some are certainly endowed with grater intelligence, stronger will or a greater portion of wealth than others, but that gives them—the cleverer, the stronger, the richer—not the least right to rule over the duller, the weaker, the poorer. God, the Father of us all, has made mankind, without exception, to be happy, and so the obligation is laid on us, as far as is possible, to make each other happy.

Conservatives tend to prefer stability even if it leads to inequality, and liberals tend to prefer equality even if it requires change.

I remember thinking Democrats and liberals were the good guys. They cared about the little guy. They cared about poor people. They cared about minorities.