Neo-conservatism Quotes

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves 'The Real New Deal Democrats' forever.

I don't regard myself as any kind of conservative, except conceivably neo, and that word, of course, is a ridiculous appellation, because it's used to describe a group that was ready to make war on the status quo, which is not a conservative position.

Part of the American administration is not religious. They are neither Evangelists nor Jews, but they have a new ideological theory regarding international policy. They are called the neo-cons. Fifteen years ago, the American intellectuals used to call them crazy, but now they are surprised to find that those crazy people are ruling America, and controlling the entire world. They say: We do not want America to be the leader of the world. We want it to rule and Americanize the world…. The neo-cons are identical to the Nazis.

The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored.

Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

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

I'm appalled that when I talk about the neo-conservatives it's somehow twisted, some sort of a racist comment.

You're considered to have a rare kind of social disease if you espouse neo-conservative ideas in Canada.

I do think, from the other side, that George W. ush was somewhat of an innocent in his thinking about what Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War and by bringing democracy to Eastern Europe. I think he believed that he could do the same thing by bringing democracy - or Midland, Texas, really - to the Middle East. I truly think he felt it was possible. "I want to do for the Middle East what Reagan did for the Soviet Union."

The United States does not feel any need to consult with anybody … except when it suits them.

The definition of a Schwarzenegger Republican is a Bush Republican who says he's a Schwarzenegger Republican.

For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons' crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight.

From 2002 to the end of his presidency, George W. Bush routinely was accused by the Left of 'creating chaos:' chaos in Iraq, chaos in Afghanistan, chaos in the Muslim world, chaos among our allies.

I never subscribed to what you might call the neo-Conservative position that somehow, at the barrel of a gun, overnight, liberty and democracy could be conjured up.

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.

The costly unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency led to a decade of war in the Middle East and the derailment of American foreign policy at large.

Our concern is with the loss of tolerance, the absence of compassion and the downgrading of fairness as expressed in this neo-conservative age.

We now know that a neo-conservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out.

We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will have waited too long.

A neo conservative is someone who is against communism but will accept big government and socialism.

Many Americans, and many more people around the world, have been outraged by what they see as President George W. Bush's radical reordering of American foreign policy.

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

I think a lot of things have become associated with the Right. For example, an unapologetic commitment to progress and modernity is now almost always associated with neo-conservatism whereas it traditionally used to be associated with left-wing thinking and moving society forward.

The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair.

There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.