Great quotes about conservatives.

[ccharles000]

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. " -Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Alfred E. Wiggam:
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.

Benjamin Disraeli:
A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

G. K. Chesterton:
The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

P. J. O'Rourke:
The Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it.

http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_conservatives.html

[BOSSHOG]

1. Thanks for the List

I'll add my own:

Liberals know the constitution is a shield, conservatives want very badly for it to be a weapon.

[DrToast]

2. My favorite

Benjamin Disraeli:
A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

So true. "We think government is terrible! So vote for us!"

[FSogol]

3. Here's my fav:

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises
in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral
justification for selfishness."
- John Kenneth Galbraith
economist and author


Runners up:

"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."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; Conservatism
is distrust of the people tempered by fear."
-William E. Gladstone

[pnorman]

9. CURSES! Ya beat me to it!

I was just getting ready to search out that Gailbraith quote!

pnorman

[Laelth]

4. Mark Shields

"A conservative is someone who agrees with liberal policy twenty years after it becomes law."

:dem:

-Laelth

[supernova]

5. Bwwahaha! Perfect!

It perfectly captures the right's habit of redrawing new "conservative" lines every generation or so. What was once liberal is the new "conservative."

Can I steal that for my sig line?

[Laelth]

8. Feel free. It belongs to the great Mark Shields, not me. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[rurallib]

6. related - from a Kos diary of three years ago or so

I didn't keep the online reference unfortunately. But this guy summed it up very well:

The reality of Reagonomics and its successors is that they have been a policy, first of burning through savings, then burning through credit, and successively carrying less and less insurance on the whole economy. That is effectively what a liberal government is - a vast insurance company, which converts the national advantage of infinite time arbitrage and recapture transperancy into the ability to spread risk. The government is the buyer, seller, borrower, lender and insurer of last resort. The analogy is similar to the kernel in UN*X - sooner or later, you must talk to a single tasking process that makes decisions about how to balance competing demands for resources.

[ccharles000]

7. kick

[Fly by night]

10. Thoughts on conservatives (posted on a Washington Post forum by a US soldier in April)

This message was posted on the Washington Post forum on April 25 by an American soldier just back from Iraq. No truer words have ever been spoken.
----
"What kind of people would justify despicable, degrading and disgusting acts of torture? What kind of person would find nothing wrong with water-boarding someone 183 times? The same kind of person who would let his country decay, let his schools decline, let poor children go without school food programs, all so millionaires could dodge their fair share of taxes.

"Conservatives are scaredy-cats, afraid of everything, not just taxes and military service. They need their guns to protect them from life and their god to protect them from death.

"That's why we have government - to protect the rest of us from the conservatives."