quotations about liberals
A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment.
WILLIS PLAYER
The Washington Post, Nov. 15, 1972
I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans.
JAMES G. WATT
New York Times, Oct. 10, 1983
A liberal is a man or woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
attributed, A Wonderful Life: 50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit
I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause -- but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journalism.
WALTER CRONKITE
interview, Playboy, 1973
Liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.
E. J. DIONNE, JR.
The War Against Public Life
It should be a cause of great pride that liberals have ventured far beyond the mind prisons of fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist capitalism, and Leave It to Beaver lifestyles. Not that Ward and June Cleaver didn't make a find life for the boys.
BILL BRANYON
Liberating Liberals
A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, And I Quote
Liberals hate America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do.
ANN COULTER
Slander
Liberals are not all going to say exactly the same at all times; I hope they never will, because they would cease to be Liberals.
WILLIAM BEVERIDGE
Why I Am a Liberal
Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
New York Post, May 14, 1969
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
STEPHEN COLBERT
address at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, Apr. 29, 2006
Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.
LUDWIG VON MISES
Liberalism
Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within. Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
ROGER COHEN
"The Death of Liberalism", New York Times, April 14, 2016
The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Last Philosophical Testament: 1943-68
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
TOM WOLFE
The Bonfire of the Vanities
A conservative believes in the present what liberals forced on the world in the past.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity. Liberals believe in equality of outcome.
MIKE ROSEN
Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 31, 2000
Liberalism -- and it is well to recall this today -- is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak.
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET
The Revolt of the Masses
Without liberals we wouldn't have unions. We wouldn't have environmental protections. We wouldn't have seat belts or birth control or the ACLU! Any of these things!
JANEANE GAROFALO
Majority Report, Apr. 21, 2005
In the passion to sanitize society, the fierce cleansers are not using soap but acid. Freedom is annihilated in the name of sanitation. They are razing, not renewing; scouring, not polishing; devastating, not developing.
WALLACE HENLEY
"How Today's Liberals Are Like the Puritans and Pharisees of Old", Christian Post, May 29, 2016