Michael Portillo Quotes

We'll need to revise the tired assumption that people automatically become more conservative as they grow older.

They say that the older you get, the more conservative you become: perhaps that's the reason there are no Tories in Scotland.

I try to make a dent in people when I can. I figure people drift toward liberalism at a young age, and I always hope that they change when they see how the world really is.

The worship of youth has diminished - perhaps generally - in recent years.

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.

The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed.

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

Just as I got older, I think I've become more and more conservative.

The country has become much more conservative, partly because it's been taken over by the religious right.

Obviously, the issue for the Left isn't aging white males; it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the Left would have a problem with female aborigines.

It is a weird thing, because most people tend to get more conservative as they get older, but I find myself going the opposite way. I am sure that by the end I will be selling Marxist pamphlets on the Holloway Road.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

Well it's really hard to satisfy the right wing. I can tell you that.

The slogan was 'Don't trust anyone over thirty'. Sixty years later the slogan became, 'Don't trust anyone over ninety'.

I'm an older generation.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

Everyone matures. When I was Newt's age, I thought I had the right answer to things. The baby-boomers as political leaders are still on trial by the American people.

A conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before.

Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.

A young man under twenty-five who is not a Socialist has no heart, one above twenty-five who remains a Socialist has no head.

The worst enemy of the new radicals are the old liberals.

The differences between Rand Paul and millennials are vast - not just on economics, but on social issues that matter to young people, too.

The older I get, the less conservative I become.

I don't believe just because you're a conservative that you're angry.