Jane Fonda Quotes

I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary.

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

It is one of the truisms of politics that a conservative is often enough a former liberal who has been 'mugged by reality.'

I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.

Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left.

I like to say now that the reason I'm conservative is because I used to be a liberal, and I learned a lot.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

Everyone is a liberal until they have something to conserve. Then they become a conservative.

When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another. Talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic.

We're gonna need more than winning elections; we're gonna need to change the way people think, and they're not gonna change what they think if there's no counter to the way liberalism is presented in the pop culture.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism is a counter-revolutionary. Whomever sides with the revolutionary people in words only but acts otherwise is a revolutionary in speech. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a revolutionary in the full sense.

One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.

We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists 'of conspiring to teach [us] to do,' but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.

The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.

I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant; individual responsibility and community. I do not see those as being mutually inconsistent.

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 radicalised by being a minister. That's when I saw how the system really worked. And that is not a very usual process, but it certainly happened to me: it gave me a lot more experience, it helped me to understand where power really lay, develop strategies for undermining or changing it, and so on. But that isn't the norm. Mr Gladstone moved to the left as he got older, and one or two other people have, but normally you swing the other way.

Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.

The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.

God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.

There is no more democratic government than a revolutionary government.

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.