Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

A tired nation is a Tory [conservative] nation.

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

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

The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative.

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.

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.

The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed.

The castle which conservatism is set to defend is the actual state of things, good and bad.

Man is by nature a conservative animal and government is his instrument for preventing rapid change.

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.

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.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

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.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

What if you are a conservative in a liberal environment? Then what you are conserving is liberalism.

Conservatism, by all means, if there is anything worth conserving, and everything not worth losing. Revolution, if there is nothing worth conserving, and everything worth gaining. These are the class lines upon which the political battle is being fought, and is bound to be fought

Goldwater and his crowd tell me that they’ll forgive you for anything except being weak.

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.

Liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives.

The liberals of both the Democratic and Republican Parties are the instruments of Satan to destroy the former great principles of these two political parties.

The best position the government could assume would be that of moderation between opposite extremes of Ultra-Toryism and Radicalism

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

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.

Every conservative policy, however, is fated from the start to fail; after all, its essence is to stop something unstoppable, to resist a development that cannot be impeded.