Max Lerner Quotes

My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.

I pass the test that says a man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.

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

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

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

The people that become the biggest jokes are people who do not change. They stay the way they were in the past.

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.

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.

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.

You always have to evolve - the minute you start building a moat around you to keep yourself safe, you're going to lose.

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

A political ideology is a very handy thing to have. It’s a real time saver because it tells you what you think about things you know nothing about.

Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen understood with singular clarity that a great and diverse people do not speak with a single voice and that adherence to a rigid ideology leaves little room for compromise and response to change.

Republicans are not going to replace left wing social engineering with right wing engineering.

The conservative principles are applicable to the to the most diverse situations.

Choose the politics of principle over the politics of personality.

You could as soon scrub the blackamoor white, as to change the principles of a professed Democrat

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.

There’s too much orthodoxy in the political process today.

A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

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

Experience should be a plus as long as it doesn't become complacency. If you say, 'We're not going to change; we didn't do it that way before,' then you've become too old.

We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.

While the ACLU's supposed principles may shift with the political winds, facts do not. They cannot.

I have been a libertarian in my past but now I consider myself a classical liberal.