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Conservativism Quotes

Browse 19 quotes about Conservativism.

Conservativism Quotes

“Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.”

WorkFreedomPowerCapitalismLaborLiberalismPowerlessnessConservativism
Book:The Abolition of Work
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“History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same —“troublous storms that toss The private state, and render life unsweet.” These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.”

HistoryMoralsConservativism
Author:Edmund Burke
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“That's what's so ironic about the conservative backlash against BDSMers. With increased visibility comes increased bigotry, and conservatives continue to rally against kinky events by local groups to get them shut down. What the anti-kink fanatics don't understand about us is that we're geeks. Sex nerds. SM intellectuals. We pay money to spend a weekend going to classes.”

BdsmKinkConservativism
Book:Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge
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“The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind.”

ProgressTraditionLeftismConservativismTraditionalismRightismPolitical LeftPolitical Right
Book:Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
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“The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel actions are, the more necessary are master builders. Dislike of the leader and the promoter, though linked emotionally to progressivism, is linked logically to total conservatism. Conversely, an authoritarian approach, natural enough in the instigator of new activities, is unjustified in the mere overseer of routines.”

LeadershipDemocracyHierarchyProgressivismConservativismDirect Democracy
Book:Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good
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“A Government can create nothing. It cannot by any exercise of its powers, by legislative enactment, or judicial decree, or executive command, cause two blades of grass to grow where one grew before....It cannot command a tree to fall in the forest, and divide itself into planks and boards, from which chairs and tables may be made. All these results can be accomplished only by the labor of human hands.”

InspirationalGovernmentPoliticsConservativismClassicalliberalismSmallgovernment
Author:Bourke Cockran
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“Following the ascendancy of the conservative Sunni Caliph al-Mutawakkil, whom Syed Ameer Ali describes as a 'cruel drunken sot in league with the qazis and mullahs,' the physical extermination of Mu'tazilites, together with Shias, began in earnest. They were removed from all governmental positions, accused of heresy, subjected to torture, and summarily executed. Scholars and scientists, most of whom subscribed to rationalist beliefs, fled Baghdad for other parts of the Islamic world. Thus ended the most serious attempt to combine reason with revelation in Islam. Apart from various isolated efforts by individua119th century Muslim reformers, the separation between the religious and secular has been complete in Islam ever since.”

MuslimRationalismMullahsConservativism
Book:Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality
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“Still, every day, I meet millennials (and Gen Xers and Gen Zers) who are working hard, creating jobs, making their own way in the free market. Which makes infinite sense. Millennials pride themselves on being individuals. In most cases, we don’t fit into the standards of our parents. We don’t like to be told what to do. We’d like to create our own futures. Most of us are a bit more free-spirited and individualistic than our parents. What more is conservatism than individual thought and freedom? The ability to have government stay out of our way and not tell us what to do. Not necessarily to have a boss, but to be the boss.”

MillennialsConservativismGenzGenxersIndividual Thought
Book:Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed
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“As of 2015 only a dozen of the then 567 federally recognized tribal nations recognize same-sex marriage...Other tribes, however, have explicitly restricted same-sex marriage (all following the passage of DOMA), including the Navajo Nation, Cherokee Nation, Muscogee Nation, Chickasaw Nation, and Iowa Tribe. Although Congress could pass a statute that affects Indian Country Lindsay Roberson...considers it highly unlikely, given the federal government's relatively hands-off support for tribal governance. Within the Navajo context, this issue has brought about deep debate about the nature of tradition. Joanne Barker has written about the battles over same-sex marriage in Navajo Nation (as well as Cherokee Nation). She documents how the tribal legislation bans and defense of them affirm the discourses of U.S. nationalism, especially in their Christian and right-wing conservative forms. IN these cases, the tribal nation's exercise of sovereignty and self-determination replicates the relations of domination and dispossession that resemble the U.S. treatment of Native Peoples.”

NationalismTribesHawaiiNative AmericansSame Sex MarriageConservativismNative American TribesTribal Relations
Book:Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism
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“In the first place, what is liberalism, speaking generally, but an attack (whether mistaken or reasonable, is quite another question) upon the existing order of things? Is this so? Yes. Very well. Then my 'fact' consists in this, that Russian liberalism is not an attack upon the existing order of things, but an attack upon the very essence of things themselves--indeed, on the things themselves; not an attack on the Russian order of things, but on Russia itself. My Russian liberal goes so far as to reject Russia; that is, he hates and strikes his own mother. Every misfortune and mishap of the mother-country fills him with mirth, and even with ecstasy. He hates the national customs, Russian history, and everything. If he has a justification, it is that he does not know what he is doing, and believes that his hatred of Russia is the grandest and most profitable kind of liberalism. (You will often find a liberal who is applauded and esteemed by his fellows, but who is in reality the dreariest, blindest, dullest of conservatives, and is not aware of the fact.) This hatred for Russia has been mistaken by some of our 'Russian liberals' for sincere love of their country, and they boast that they see better than their neighbors what real love of one's country should consist in. But of late they have grown, more candid and are ashamed of the expression 'love of country,' and have annihilated the very spirit of the words as something injurious and petty and undignified. This is the truth, and I hold by it; but at the same time it is a phenomenon which has not been repeated at any other time or place; and therefore, though I hold to it as a fact, yet I recognize that it is an accidental phenomenon, and may likely enough pass away. There can be no such thing anywhere else as a liberal who really hates his country; and how is this fact to be explained among us? By my original statement that a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal--that's the only explanation that I can see.”

RussiaLiberalismOrthodoxyConservativism
Book:The Idiot
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