Best 204 quotes in «liberalism quotes» category

I am just stupefied here. The left has officially stamped it now: Oil is a villain. Now, please ask yourselves: When did this start?

If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

Identity liberalism, as I understand it, is expressive rather than persuasive.

I guess you'd say, including the - what I just spoke about, the learning that liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be.

I'll just say this: The last problem Paris Hilton has is being in a John McCain ad.

If Trump does not start seeing things through an ideological prism, he will never understand the method, the motive, and the how and why these attacks against him happen. He doesn't see liberalism, and because he doesn't see liberalism, he can be outfoxed by it every day. He's not an ideological person.

I think that one of the things that has happened is that psychiatry has become the religion of liberalism.

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

It's classic the way liberalism works. If anybody has an advantage over anybody for any reason, it's not permitted. It's not fair. And it's got to be regulated and equalized. And in the process, competition's destroyed and when competition goes, so do consumer advantages.

Liberalism is a mental disorder.

It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.

Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I'm stepping over it.

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics.

Liberalism is unsustainable. When things go wrong in liberalism they pile more liberalism on top. Pretty good example of what's wrong with the US budget, US healthcare. Liberalism breaks it. Government breaks it. They pile more liberalism on top of it until it eventually implodes, like Obamacare is going to, or like Social Security is going to. All of these things, they're not sustainable, because liberalism isn't.

Liberalism is a scourge. It destroys the human spirit. It destroys prosperity. It assigns sameness to everybody. And wherever I find it, I oppose it.

Liberalism, the dominant ideology of our time, has been dangerously distorted by the impact of economism. It is that impact which has knocked the citizen off his pedestal and replaced him with the consumer.

Liberty isn't liberalism, arbitrariness, but it's connected; it's conditioned by the great values of love and solidarity and in general by the good.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid.

One must never underestimate the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.

No one is responsible under liberalism.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Neo-Liberalism promised us a Global Village and gave us a Potemkin Village.

The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant

The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

The world is facing a historic turning point because the system of materialistic liberalism has come to a deadlock.

True American Liberalism utterly denies the whole creed of socialism.

The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism.

The politicized version of Shia Islam that we see in the Islamic Republic post-1979 clearly is very conservative, but, there are other things one could say about Ayatollah Khomeini's concept of a Shia state because that in itself is a blasphemy as far as most Shia clerics are concerned. There's a theory that he developed in the early 1960s in the town of Najaf talking about - well not liberalism, necessarily, but flexibility though.

And then came the war. That certainly raised the pressure from the personal front. It also brought relief for all the Progressives. They had been against war. It was part of the new creed that war was simply due to sex-repression. Sex, being unrepressed by Progressives, they naturally maintained that they had debunked war and they dismissed it with a laugh. But this war was different. It was present, pressing. The enemy was obviously suffering frightfully from sex-repression. The free, unrepressed peoples must unite now to oppose and end this sex-repression. So the Progressives found themselves freed from their awkward loyalty to peace, which, anyhow, was only a by-product of being unrepressed. After all, if little Alec is permitted to hit Susie on the head for fear he’d grow up repressed if he didn’t, surely if I have been repressed during childhood—not allowed to kick and bite father and mother—I had better get it out of my system now, especially when the enemy is so reactionary and would never permit children their charter right to kick their elders.

We have seen this complete right wing takeover of modern liberalism, and it is an ugly spectacle to behold.

A liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she will call the police.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

All popular political doctrines charge your brain with various liberal ideas, such as respect for human rights and freedom, toleration, gender equality and so and so forth. However, in the political arena, a candidate with a charismatic personality in the eyes of the masses, has a great advantage over his opponents in political competition. If you want to become a likely winner, cultivate your charisma, make people believe in you and share your opinion, with no regard to what it is. Your victory depends more on your charisma than on the ideas that you follow.

And then everything changed. Liberal democracy crawled out of history’s dustbin, cleaned itself up and conquered the world. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag. The blitzkrieg began in southern Europe, where the authoritarian regimes in Greece, Spain and Portugal collapsed, giving way to democratic governments. In 1977 Indira Gandhi ended the Emergency, re-establishing democracy in India. During the 1980s military dictatorships in East Asia and Latin America were replaced by democratic governments in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and South Korea. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the liberal wave turned into a veritable tsunami, sweeping away the mighty Soviet Empire, and raising expectations of the coming end of history. After decades of defeats and setbacks, liberalism won a decisive victory in the Cold War, emerging triumphant from the humanist wars of religion, albeit a bit worse for wear. As the Soviet Empire imploded, liberal democracies replaced communist regimes not only in eastern Europe, but also in many of the former Soviet republics, such as the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. Even Russia nowadays pretends to be a democracy. Victory in the Cold War gave renewed impetus for the spread of the liberal model elsewhere around the world, most notably in Latin America, South Asia and Africa. Some liberal experiments ended in abject failures, but the number of success stories is impressive. For instance, Indonesia, Nigeria and Chile have been ruled by military strongmen for decades, but all are now functioning democracies

Another basic characteristic of liberalism which constitutes a formidable obstacle to an oppressed group's liberation is its conception of human nature. If selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate, really are among defining human traits, as every liberal philosopher since Locke tries to convince us, the oppression in civil society—i.e. in the social sphere not regulated by the state—is a fact of life, and the basic civil relationship between a man and a women will always remain a battlefield. Woman, being less aggressive, is then either the less human of the two and doomed to subjugation, or else she must get more power-hungry herself and try to dominate man. Liberation for both is not feasible.

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

As commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world.

...Bad behavior is bipartisan, but the Left seems to have an instinct for violence. This makes perfect sense for a worldview with revolutionary underpinnings....But yet, they claim oppression due to their inability to control the words and minds of others. That is why the Left is a threat to both freedom and democracy: Because at the end of the day, they don't really believe in either.

At the beginning of this chapter we identified several practical threats to liberalism. The first is that humans might become militarily and economically useless. This is just a possibility, of course, not a prophecy. Technical difficulties or political objections might slow down the algorithmic invasion of the job market. Alternatively, since much of the human mind is still uncharted territory, we don’t really know what hidden talents humans might discover in themselves, and what novel jobs they might create to offset the loss of others. That, however, may not be enough to save liberalism. For liberalism believes not just in the value of human beings – it also believes in individualism. The second threat facing liberalism is that, while the system might still need humans in the future, it will not need individuals. Humans will continue to compose music, teach physics and invest money, but the system will understand these humans better than they understand themselves and will make most of the important decisions for them. The system will thereby deprive individuals of their authority and freedom

At the center of this worldview is the evil of oppression, the virtue of “marginalized” identities—based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability—and the perfectionist quest to eliminate anything the marginalized may perceive as oppressive or “invalidating.” Such perceptions are given a near-absolute presumption of validity, even if shared by a fraction of the “oppressed group.” Meanwhile, the viewpoints of the “privileged”—a category that includes economically disadvantaged whites, especially men—are radically devalued.

Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.

Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.

Books and minds only work when they're open.

Both David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh fell in the fight for freedom, the right of the Americans to be left alone.

But he saw now that he must remain alone, a "Liberal," scorned by all the noisier prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But at worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny should finally dominate the world.

But it would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the Utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.