Great Throughts Treasury

"There is a danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism." - Henry George

"Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism." - Walter Lippmann

"Success breeds conservatism, and that means a love affair with the status quo and an aversion to change." - Frank Popoff or Popov

"All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. but you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"The single greatest power in the world today is the power to change... The most recklessly irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." - Karl Deutsch, fully Karl Wolfgang Deutsch

"True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"" - Tyron Edwards

"There is radicalism in all getting, and conservatism in all keeping. Lovemaking is radical, while marriage is conservative." - Eric Hoffer

"Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism or radicalism is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what is called socialism." - Richard T. Ely

"Conservatism is the politics of reality." - William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas – an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives.... Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed. Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability." - Morris Raphael Cohen

"This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of ‘revolutionizing themselves and things,’ much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People’s Labor Party ‘revolutionaries’ is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of ‘proletarian morality’ replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little ‘Red Book’ and other sacred litanies." - Murray Bookchin

"EFA certainly remains an imperfect tool. However, its major weakness may be the inherent conservatism of the method rather than the concerns expressed by economists and techno-optimists. EFA findings, already alarming enough, likely under-estimate rather than over-estimate the total human load. In this light the real sustainability problem is that the official world remains in the thrall of the perpetual growth myth." - William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel

"It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

"The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving." - Robertson Davies

"Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving." - Robertson Davies

"I believe with all my heart that standing up for America means standing up for the God who has so blessed our land. We need God's help to guide our nation through stormy seas. But we can't expect Him to protect America in a crisis if we just leave Him over on the shelf in our day-to-day living." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"If you think you can - you can!" - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully." - Russell Kirk

"There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth." - Russell Kirk

"The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Here were these two, bandying little phrases, drawing purses, looking at cards, and both unconscious of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise enough to be sure of the working of the mind of the other. He could not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realized that she was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she had yielded something - he, that he had gained a victory. Already he took control in directing the conversation. His words were easy. Her manner was relaxed." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us." - Tryon Edwards