Red Smith Quotes

The older I get, the less conservative I become.

I am a bit of a lefty on some issues.

Well, I am not afraid of the word 'liberal.'

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.

A liberal is a person who kept an open mind … a person who did not always look backward but would look forward to new possible solutions.

I'm a progressive.

I am proud to be a progressive.

I think 'progressive' is different than 'liberal' - I know a lot of people use them interchangeably - but I think I'm far more progressive than I am liberal.

I'm not a liberal, I'm a radical!

I'm here to change the world, and if I am not, I am probably wasting my time.

I'm not a political progressive, but I consider myself a progressive person. What makes me a progressive, in my opinion, is the fact that I try to improve myself and by large improve the world that I'm in - in the smallest way possible.

The craving to change the world is perhaps a reflection of the craving to change ourselves.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

Democrats believed in "progressivism." They believed in Big Government. But they at least attached optimistic outcomes to it. They really believed they were helping America. They really believed they were helping families, helping people. Now they've just become, "The country's horrible, it's rotten, it needs to be reformed!" The liberals of John F. Kennedy's day did not think there was anything really major wrong with this country.

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

That isn't how I've always felt. As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples. Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

I believe in "love it, or change it" rather than "love it, or leave it."

Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself.

The world "out there" won't change until the world "in here" does.

What lasting impact will I make on the world and those around me? What will I live my life for? How will I be remembered? I want to leave the world a better place than it was when I got here. I want to experience as much as I can in this very short life that we have.

I find myself more and more interested only in roles which move the world forward.

I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.

In sum, the struggle for our future is . . . the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world.

All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.