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.
Anyone who is not a liberal in his youth has no heart. Anyone who remains so as he matures has no brain!
If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.
People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives.
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
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.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….
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.
Socialism and communism are now so near each other that there is hardly any difference between them. In the past they differed from each other as does liberalism from democracy
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.
Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle.
The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.
The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected.
If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!
As a teenager I was more of an anarchist, but now I want people to thrive and be harmonious.
The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.
Political theories, once adopted, do not disappear so easily.
The full implications of feminism will evolve over time, as we organize, experiment, think, analyze, and revise our ideas and strategies in light of our experiences. No theory emerges in full detail overnight; the dominant theories of our day have expanded and changed over many decades. That it will take time should not discourage us. That we might fail to pursue our ideas - given the enormous need for them in society today - is unconscionable.
Contemporary Conservatism ... is like contemporary art, seldom much admired in its time; it only achieves acceptance and admiration in retrospect.
I think democracy is not a destination. I don't think socialism is a railway station and if we catch the right train with the right driver, we'll get there. I think it's a way of thinking about things and every generation has to do it again.
Our ideas are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people …. This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.
Western civilisation needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realised the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.
The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.
