American Conservatism Quotes

The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.

I don't apologize for supporting Trump. He said all the right things, and nobody else would even say it. I suppose it's possible that another politician who really meant it would come along. There's Kris Kobach, Tom Cotton, Jeff Sessions... there are probably a handful of politicians.

Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

Most people who call themselves conservatives can't explain the American value system.

Harvey Weinstein does not personify American liberalism any more than Bill O'Reilly personifies American conservatism.

To complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservatism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization, and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives. From this confusion, from the popular belief that Hamilton was the founder of American conservatism, the forces of tradition in the United States never have fully escaped.

Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is... Paul Ryan.

Here's one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan.

In the early 1970s in Washington, a small group of young conservative activists came together to try and change American politics. They called themselves the New Right, and they were convinced that unless they did something drastic, the liberals and the left-wingers in America were going to take over the country.

America is conservative in fundamental principles... but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.

A lot of people want Trump to be impeached. I do not. Because just when you think Trump is awful, you remember Mike Pence. Mike Pence is what happens when Anderson Cooper isn't gay.

My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit.

I've never met anyone who has said, "My goal is to make America mediocre." That's a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.

The Left despises Texas, with its stellar record of job growth; Texas, with its strong support for traditional marriage and the sanctity of life; Texas, the root of the conservative tree. Should the Left succeed in its attempt to turn Texas purple, America could turn permanently blue.

Donald Trump descends in a very powerful way from longstanding tenets of American conservatism, they're just not the movement conservatism we associate with Reagan.

'National Review' came along, in '55, at the moment when American conservatism most needed it.

I love America. I'm concerned about America and I believe the heart and soul of conservatives and Republicans recognize that the principles that Donald Trump is talking about have nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with keeping America strong.

Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn't exist in America in 1940. The word 'conservative' was associated primarily with fringe groups - anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League.

There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.

Liberals in Hollywood can't stand when Americans resonate to conservatives on television.

I think McCarthy was a menace... because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right... and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we [conservatives] are all suffering from it.

The United States survives so long as at least one of its major parties is politically and intellectually healthy. I don't think the Republican Party, or I should say the Republican Party as the vehicle for modern American conservative ideas, survives with Donald Trump.

Southern Republicans are guided by the Bible. Western Republicans read the Constitution. Seen in historical terms, it's the difference between a movement descended from George Wallace and one that harks back to Barry Goldwater.

My friend Michael Reagan has given us the blueprint for a new Reagan revolution- and he has given Ronald Reagan back to us again. Read it, learn it, live it, love it!

It's time for conservative Americans to right the ship again.