CONSERVATISM

Related Subjects: Caution, Reserve

1. We are living in a phase of evolution which is known as the twentieth century and stands for a certain achieved growth of the human mind. But the enormous majority of the human race do not belong to that phase at all.—ROBERT BRIFFAULT, Rational Evolution
   

2. We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our house, that old ways are the safest and surest ways.—SIR EDWARD COKE
   

3. It seems to me a barren thing, this Conservatism—an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics that engenders nothing.—DISRAELI, Coningsby
   

4. A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.—DISRAELI
   

5. 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.—EMERSON, Conduct of Life
   

6. We are reformers in spring and summer. In autumn and winter we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning; conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative; conservatism, negative. Conservatism goes for comfort; reform for truth.—EMERSON

7. I often think it's comical
   How Nature always does contrive
   That every boy and every gal,
   That's born into this world alive,
   Is either a little Liberal,
   Or else a little Conservative.—W. S. GILBERT, Iolanthe
   

8. A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.—ELBERT HUBBARD, One Thousand and One Epigrams
   

9. A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon, out of respect for that "ancient institution," the old one.—DOUGLAS JERROLD
   

10. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?—LINCOLN
    

11. Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.—HERBERT SPENCER, Social Statics
    

12. While it is the conservatives' function to be intensely practical, that ought not to be confused with simply being selfish; and while it seems to be the progressives' function to be idealistic, that idealism ought to be based on potential realities rather than on vague mystic emotion.—HENRY A. WALLACE
    

13. The staid, conservative, Came­over-with-the-Conqueror type of mind.—WILLIAM WATSON, A Study in Contrasts
    

14. Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates.—WOODROW WILSON