Barry Goldwater Quotes

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.

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.

I don't trust liberals, I trust conservatives.

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

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.

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’m extremely conservative but I’m not mad at anybody about it.

Our only hope for America is that every conservative takes upon him or herself the project of learning what American and conservative values are, coming to understand what leftism stands for, and learning how to make the case for those values to women, young people, blacks and Hispanics.

You could accuse Republicans of a lot of things, but you could never convict us of being too conservative!

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

You know, conservatism is not a bad thing. It's not a pejorative.

I try to make a dent in people when I can. I figure people drift toward liberalism at a young age, and I always hope that they change when they see how the world really is.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not - and more often than liberals - about most of the important issues of the day.

Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals.

It is said that a neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.

One of the most important things liberals don't understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism's various 'wings,' is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where 'traditional morality' serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa.

My wife Hillary sometimes accuses me of trying to reinvent the 19th century. In some ways she's right because I like things that I can understand and that aren't too complicated.

For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

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?

Neoconservatism is a blend of realism and idealism. We have the idealism of the liberals but we look at the reality of the world.

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

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

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