Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. – Ambrose Bierce
There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots. – Stephen Carter
A conservative is a fellow who thinks a rich man should have a square deal. – Frank Dane
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
Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid. – Kin Hubbard
I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. – John Maynard Keynes
The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations. – Henry Kissinger
The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because its the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained. – Gerda Lerner
What is conservatism? It is not adherence to the old and tried, but against the new and untried? – Abraham Lincoln
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who has never learned to walk. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice. – Harold Rosenberg
We hear the haunting presentiment of a dutiful middle age in the current reluctance of young people to select any option except the one they feel will impinge upon them the least. – Gail Sheehy
The word conservative is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties. – Norman Tebbit
That mans the true Conservative who lops the moldered branch away. – Alfred Lord Tennyson
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will. – Mark Twain
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. – Mark Twain
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. – Mark Twain
