Mark Shields Quotes

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. . . . A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.

I joined a Republican Party that was used to losing, used to being browbeaten by the Democrats. I represent a totally different style.

The Republican Party is no longer the Republican Party.

He changed his position on virtually everything. I'm a moderate Republican, that's what I am, so I'd be inclined to support someone like Mitt Romney. But all those changes give me pause.

The legacy of the New Del was, more than anything else, a matter of ideological change. Henceforth, nearly everyone would look to the federal government for solutions to problems great and small, real and imagined, personal as well as social.

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.

I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.

I was a right winger into the 70's but I left the right in late 70's.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

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

You cannot just change regimes; you have to change mindsets.

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of its exhausted ideas.

There isn't a day when I don't look in the mirror and think, 'How in the hell did I become a conservative Republican?' It's still a weird reckoning, because it shouldn't have happened.

When I went off to college, I went believing I was a Republican. And actually I was president of Young Republicans for a couple of months and then I decided that I was much more in the camp of people like, you know, President Johnson - trying to promote civil rights, voting rights, ending poverty.

I was more conservative when I was younger. But I don't think that I've moved left - I think the country has moved right.

We've always had anti-Americans. We've always had left-wing protesters and so forth, but they were always off to the left kooks. They were always oddball nutcases. Now they're not. They come across as ordinary, everyday mainstream people. It just disgusts me. It's so unfortunate, so unnecessary.

For the average American, the message is clear. Liberalism is no longer the answer. It is the problem.

There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision - global democratic revolution - into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.

I would like to think that we have made much more progress, that we've come much further, to have someone like a Donald Trump to emerge as the nominee of a major political party.

How very important it is to bring about in the human mind the radical revolution. The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. Considering what the world is now with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on... man is still as he was, is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and has built a society along these lines.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

Look at the way you live. You've sold out. Next thing I know you'll become a Republican." She shook her head. "Where are the values I raised you with?