Ideological Change Quotes

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.

I'm not politically motivated. I used to be - passionately. I used to be very Left wing. Then I went very Right wing, and now I rest somewhere in the middle.

I was a Democrat for a period of time early on. And then I was also an independent. And then I became a Republican.

When I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist, pretty much to the left. But not when I left the university. I quickly got wise. I'd read about what had happened to Russia in 1917 when the Communists took over.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

I've been telling people, if we want to keep the Republican party in Texas, the Republican party in Texas needs to start looking like Texas. And I think that this is - that goes for the rest of the country as well.

In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind.

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves 'The Real New Deal Democrats' forever.

The verdict of history ... is that worn out ideas have never risen to power among a people who have worn them out.

I used to be a conservative.

The political philosophy of one generation becomes the political anathema of another.

Ideologies of personal liberty and free will cannot be imposed by machine guns. Wrong ideas cannot be cured by war or treaty. They are matters of mind and spirit.

There's a lot of confusion about the political ideologies of both parties [Democrats and Republicans] have switched 180 degrees in 150 years. It just too confusing. Everybody claiming Lincoln as their own. And everybody should claim Lincoln as their own, because he represents all of us, and what he did basically provided the opportunities that all of us are enjoying today.

The conservative movement today is like that tall ship with its proud captain: strong, accomplished but veering off course into the dangerous and uncharted waters of big government republicanism.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

I am from an F.D.R. liberal-Democratic family. With proximity to government, I have become more libertarian.

I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as nationalism was concerned, and had to reach out for a communist ideology.

There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.

Political theories, once adopted, do not disappear so easily.

Instead of ideological objectives of a political nature, today we are faced with ideological objectives of economic nature.

We just have to be crystal clear that if we were to abandon all the reforms made over some very painful years in the Labour party, we would be consigned back to opposition.

Now, you'll hear people call here on my show claiming they used to be lib and they've changed their minds. That happens, but it happens naturally. It's not because I've focused on trying to persuade people. I think while it's a noble objective to try to help people to see things the right way, this is a different psychological collection of human beings, and they are walled off from anything that's not them.

Especially for my father it was a great change. He used to be a socialist and even a member of the socialist party. But then he became an orthodox Jew.

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.

I see some parallels between then [Lincoln's era] and now. Certainly the division of ideologies between two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. In 1865, the Democrats were the Conservatives and the Republicans were the progressives, and today it's just the opposite.