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Conservatives Quotes

Browse 79 quotes about Conservatives.

Conservatives Quotes

“I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.”

WealthBusinessPovertyEthicsCapitalismBig BusinessConservativesLiberalsAnticapitalismSocialists
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.”

FactsPoliticsInformationInternetNewsDataBeliefsWorldviewConservativesLiberalsSources
Author:George Saunders
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“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.”

PeopleAngerConservativesLiberals
Book:We Learn Nothing
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“L'imbecillità, si noti, non è né di destra né di sinistra. Vale per gli imbecilli ciò che scriveva il grande storico Carlo M. Cipolla nel suo intramontabile saggio intitolato "Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana": ovvero che gli stupidi si distribuiscono in modo uniforme in tutta la società, senza distinzioni di titolo scolastico, di professione o di reddito. Quindi anche l'imbecille si distribuisce equamente di qua e di là. Magari quelli di destra sono un po' più determinati e sbrigativi ma, se è per questo, quelli di sinistra sono assai più convinti delle proprie idee e, soprattutto, vorrebbero pure convincerti della superiore civiltà e del rigore morale dell'imbecille progressista.”

PeoplePoliticsSocietyStupidityConservativesLiberalsRight And Left
Book:Sinistrati: Storia sentimentale di una catastrofe politica
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“[Trump] is also the personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one man megabrand, whose wife and children are spin-off brands, with all the pathologies and conflicts of interest inherent in that. He is the embodiment of the belief that money and power provide license to impose one's will on others, whether that entitlement is expressed by grabbing women or grabbing the finite resources from a planet on the cusp of catastrophic warming. He is the product of a business culture that fetishizes "disruptors" who make their fortunes by flagrantly ignoring both laws and regularity standards. Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project—one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones—that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs and superheroes who will save humanity.”

MoneyPowerTrumpCorporationsGlobal WarmingCeoFree MarketDonald TrumpConservativesCeos
Book:No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
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“When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.”

FootballRacismDrinkingLondonSoccerNflFishingRomeItalyForeignersAmerican FootballPubsAlabamaConservativesLiberalsCockneys20102008YuppiesSnobsRio De JaneiroArsenal FcRednecks2010 Fifa World CupSoccer In The United StatesUltimate FightingYobsAuburn AlabamaBass FishingBubbasFootball HooliganismLiberal Elite
Author:Robert Stacy McCain
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“Rapid growth in wealth inequality results in the inevitable isolation of a very small, very rich, very privileged section of the community from the material experiences of everyone else. And when this out-of-touch minority group is enfranchised to make the decisions on behalf of people they don't know, can't see, have no wish to understand, and think of entirely in dehumanised, transactional, abstract terms, the results for the rest of us are devastating.”

LawUnionsEqualityInequalityFairnessEquityConservativesWorkers RightsInequityRight Wing Politics
Book:On Fairness
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“A billionaire plutocrat is now sitting in the White House. Democracy has been overthrown. A right wing coup d’état has taken place. The Confederacy has defeated the Union. Racist Nazis are now running America, calling themselves “patriots”. They are the enemies of the People, the enemies of America, and the enemies of the world. We need to reboot the world.”

RacismDonald TrumpNazisConservativesPlutocracyConfederacyAlt Right
Book:Full Retard: The Dumbest Just Got Dumber
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“My team is very disappointed, as am I myself, but there is nothing we can do except hope for an agreement between the British in London and the British in Belfast." -- Monday, 4th December 2017 [Theresa May was in Brussels to sign the Joint Report on the financial settlement between EU and UK but had to hurry back to London after Arlene Foster and the DUP objected to its Article 48 (and threatened to bring down her government)]”

Politics QuotesEuropean UnionConservativesBrexitToriesDupTheresa MayArlene FosterNastiz
Book:My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion
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“The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.”

ConservativesLiberalsOmnivoreOpenness To Experience
Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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“They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.”

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Author:Robert Reich
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“People don’t adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. They tend to develop certain “characteristic adaptations” and “life narratives” that make them resonate—unconsciously and intuitively—with the grand narratives told by political movements on the left (such as the liberal progress narrative). People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right (such as the Reagan narrative). Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix. I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality. In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community.”

MoralityGenesConservativesLiberalsMoral Foundation
Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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“It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive. (p. 6)”

IntoleranceConservativesLiberals
Book:Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus
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“In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.”

PoliticsIdeologyPolitical PartiesConservativesLiberalsNixonPolitical SystemPresidential Administrations
Author:Jeffrey Frank
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“Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George W. Bush reached out to Latino voters by showing a familiarity with their language and history, emphasizing the values of diversity and inclusion. Depicting Latinos as a distinct and valuable part of America’s democratic mosaic, conservative multiculturalism connected Latino culture to Republican values, emphasizing conservative approaches to faith, patriotism and the traditional family. Trump, by contrast, knows nothing of the history of Latinos in the United States and rarely even pretends to find value in Latinos’ distinct identities. Rather than offering his non-White voters recognition, Trump has offered them multiracial whiteness.”

TrumpRepublican PartyLatinoDonald TrumpRepublicansConservativesGeorge W BushBush2020 Election
Author:Cristina Beltrán
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“And I've noticed that the people in the ultraconservative extremist right, right now, have built a new metanarrative around America. And it started with the rise of the election of Donald Trump. But that metanarrative was anyone who does not see strength in America is weak. Anyone who opposes us is an enemy. Anyone who gets in our way will be trampled. We will not govern as a nation of equals. We will govern over and rule over people. Democracy is losing the metanarrative story.”

DemocracyExtremismRight WingDonald TrumpConservativesExtremistsMetanarratives
Author:Malcolm W. Nance
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“Inevitably there would be a complaint about dark faces, moving around neighborhoods where they didn't belong, and then another about gay teachers, making queers of their students. A world turned on its head! Tradition being destroyed! A way of life at stake! It didn't matter if it was about headscarves in the Marais, or a fight about bathrooms in North Carolina--the complaint was always the same. Toxic nostalgia porn, is how Nancy likes to describe it. Men who get off by sticking their heads in the sand. Who swear the future is destroying their country, as they pick bones from their teeth.”

PoliticsRacismDiscriminationFascismPatriarchyHomophobiaXenophobiaConservativesSocial InjusticeToxic Men
Book:Let's Not Do That Again
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“While progressives have great contempt for the past, they often have a more accurate sense of the past’s worth than conservatives do. Naïve and unrefined conservatives are sometimes willing to sell off huge tracts of the past at cut rates, but progressives who buy up the past never underestimate its worth. Because traditional things are so profoundly valuable, progressives are constantly angling for conservatives to give them up. The person who controls icons of the past also has some power over everyone whose identity is represented by those icons.”

TraditionConservatives
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“In my experience conservatives hate reporters mainly because they see us as phonies. We reject the idea that we belong to a class, or that we have our own tribal beliefs. Sometimes the hypocrisy is something they’ve seen—upper-class liberals, railing about racism in the heartland from the comfort of an all-white suburban town, where they occasionally tip a Puerto Rican gardener or hire a Republican plumber. But a lot of it has to do with approach and tone, the way we openly write for and celebrate professional-sect audiences, unlike the columnists of the past, the Mike Roykos or Jack Newfields, who were unembarrassed to write in the language of the working person.”

MediaJournalismConservatives
Book:Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another
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“A billionaire plutocrat is now sitting in the White House. Democracy has been overthrown. A right wing coup d’état has taken place. The Confederacy has defeated the Union. Racist Nazis are now running America, calling themselves “patriots”. They are the enemies of the People, the enemies of America, and the enemies of the world. The time has come to get rid of the global elite and their brainwashed right wing puppets. The time has come for the people to take control of their own destiny. We need to reboot the world.”

RacismExtremismRight WingDonald TrumpNazisConservativesPlutocracyTraitorsIdiocracyAlt Right
Author:Ranty McRanterson
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“For instance, there's a college in northern California called Chico State, which is where guys like Reagan and Shultz [Reagan's Secretary of State] send their kids so they won't be infected by "lefties" at Berkeley. The place is right in the middle of four hundred miles of cornfields, or whatever it is they grow out there, a million miles from nowhere, and when you fly in you land at an airport that's about half the size of a house. Well, when I landed there, a student and a faculty member who were like the two local radicals at the school came out to meet me. And as we were walking to the car, I noticed we had to go a pretty long distance, because the airport was all surrounded with yellow police tape. So I asked these guys, "What's going on, are they rebuilding the landing strip or something?" You know what they said? "No, that's to protect the airport from Arab terrorists." I said, "Arab terrorists in northern California?" But they thought so. And when I got into the town, everybody was walking around in army fatigues and wearing yellow ribbons, saying "If Saddam comes, we're going to fight to the death," and so on.”

ConservativeRight WingConservativesRight Wingers
Book:Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
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“In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”

LifeDeathMurderAbortion20th Century1960sGunsLaw And OrderConservativesLiberals
Book:These Truths: A History of the United States
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“You all are in a hopeless bind here. Standards are inescapable. Imposed standards are inescapable. You want to pretend that this is not the case, all the while vigorously telling us how you would impose them. The funniest thing about this is that you cannot see (or will not admit) what you are doing. We (conservative Christians) have a standard, we know the basis for it, and we are willing to live by it and defend it. You [progressives] have a standard, you are willing to impose it on the rest of us, but when called upon to defend or explain your standard (and why it is authoritative over all of us), you surround yourselves with a cloud of clichés. But no society can exist unless the adherents of the worldview in power are willing to act via the law as though the adherents of various minority views are just flat wrong. Just admit that this is what you are currently doing to us. The rest of your day will be sunny and filled with epistemic relief.”

GaslightingProgressivesConservativesSecularistsBy What StandardSkyhooks
Book:Apologetics in the Void: Hometown Hurly-Burly
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“It is well know that it is career suicide for any person in Hollywood to be explicitly conservative. If they share any perspective that pivots away from liberal orthodoxy, they are accused of racism and branded a nazi. If they are black, they are accused of insanity.”

HollywoodConservativesBlack America
Book:Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation
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“The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W.B.B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Fold (1903): They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly. How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than considering what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. The paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problem”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves-and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives there are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitute elements of that life.”

GovernmentPoliticsRaceConservativesLiberalsRace Politics
Book:Race Matters
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“Maybe you don’t know the southside of Chicago....I grew up in a house of addiction, poverty, Government assistance, Divorce, neglect, abandonment, and violence. This wasn’t a unique experience in my neighborhood. There was a club in my school, and everyone knew who its members were: there was no hiding it. From the stink of your unwashed clothes, to Kids cracking Jokes in the lunchroom about your mom or dad being an addict, or worse. Some kids came to school with fresh bruises every week. If you were in this club, other students would rip on you. This was to be expected I suppose. But the teachers also looked at you differently. Not with empathy or even pity. More like they looked through you, As if your future was already written on your dirty clothes, and your weary eyes, on your dark skin.”

Conservatives
Book:Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed
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“But I wrote this book To focus on an overlooked part Of my perceived accomplishments. If I achieve beyond any Statistical or cultural Expectations, If I’ve managed to play the cards I’ve been dealt With some success, it’s because 1) I’ve relied on a core set of conservative Values to make it happen; 2) I was not alone on this journey. And the best thing is: I’m just getting started.”

RepublicansConservativesConservative PoliticsConservatives In CollegeBlack ConservatismConservatives Capitalism
Book:Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed
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