David Gergen Quotes

It is very difficult to be a Tory intellectual.

Judge us not by the rhetoric; judge us by the results.

I think President Obama is a committed, practicing nonideologue. He's consumed by neither tactics nor ideology. He is more concerned about outcomes than he is about process and categorizations.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

You know some people are all about talk. I'm about results. Every victory, every conservative victory, I've had, I've had to bleed and fight to accomplish it, always adhering to our conservative principles, and refusing to take no for an answer.

People want someone focused on getting the job done, not political talking points but rather solving problems.

An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.

I'm a woman of very few words, but lots of action.

I have never found a Federalist over the age of 30 who has ever changed his mind about politics.

Conservatives don’t seem to criticize their own as much as liberals do. It’s not that they don’t do it. It’s that they don’t do it with the same zeal and enthusiasm.

The future belongs to Conservatives. They are younger, they are more energetic, they dominate the party caucuses, they dominate the nominating process. They are committed to ideas, not simply personal aggrandizement or title.

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.

If the Democratic Party is to win in November, it will have to fly with both its wings—the liberal and the conservative.

I am a conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a radical to remove all that is bad.

Many Americans don't like the simple things. That's what they have against conservatives.

Conservatives are unashamed by self-interest and feel comfortable exercising power on their own behalf.

Some people say we Democrats have to nominate a moderate in 1988, someone who doesn't say much, who says it with a slightly southern accent, who espouses strong conservatism with just a little dash of compassion thrown in. They've described a liberal Republican basically, sort of a George W. Bush with chest hair.

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.

The Republican party should have learned its lesson -- that it must be a conservative party.

All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

Support the most conservative candidate who is electable

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.

This difference between the two parties covers a wide range, and is indicative of the conservative thought of the one and the progressive thought of the other.

Conservatives tend to prefer stability even if it leads to inequality, and liberals tend to prefer equality even if it requires change.

Liberals ... enjoy the company of other liberals, just as conservatives enjoy the company of other conservatives.