A conservative is a fellow who thinks a rich man should have a square deal.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who has never learned to walk.
A conservative sees a man drowning 50 feet from shore, throws him a 25 foot long rope, and tells him to swim to it. A liberal throws him a rope 50 feet long, then drops his end and goes off to perform another good deed.
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
All great peoples are conservative.
All reactionaries are paper tigers.
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory — to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.
That man's the true Conservative who lops the moldered branch away.
The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.
The word ''conservative'' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.