Jeb Bush Quotes

'Putting People First' was progressivism revived and at its best.

Every now and then, President Obama sorta drops his veil. He's less coy about his philosophy, he sort of reveals his true governing philosophy, what he really believes.

Too many members of Congress believe they can solve all economic problems, cure all social ills, and bring about worldwide peace and prosperity simply by creating new federal programs.

Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution.

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

Those are the liberals who don't want to win. Those are the liberals who are in love with noble defeats, and I'm sick and tired of noble defeats.

You can't get much more liberal than John Kerry is. I mean, he's my candidate, but, I mean, come on.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

A liberal will cut off your leg so he can hand you a crutch.

Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.

My father was an ardent socialist for many years.

Barack Obama's political roots are liberal, but he has always resisted buying into the brand of liberalism that denigrates American greatness and potential.

Frankly, my politics are pretty left of left.

I have always considered myself of the reforming centre-left.

To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something - to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.

Teddy Kennedy rose to become a liberal lion by collaborating with Republicans.

... The Right Reverend New Dealer

If you would look at my record, you would know that I’m a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.

I am having nothing to do with this so-called civil rights bill. The liberal left-wingers have passed it. Now let them employ some pinknik social engineers in Washington, D.C., to figure out what to do with it.

I do think the Obama agenda is the furthest left agenda we've seen since probably LBJ and the Great Society. And the differences have been that instead of him trying to go center-left, he's gone - in my estimation - more left. He's shown the country a much more aggressive liberal, more European style agenda, and that's on a center-right country.

If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.

I'm not your quintessential liberal.

‎"I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.

The Democratic Party has become the party of Bernie Sanders, I mean they are the progressives. That's who control.

We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.