Liberal Ideals Quotes

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

Even though Senator Cranston was one of the most liberal members of the Senate, most of the time I was with him he was on the phone asking rich men for money….His ideals were as wonderful as any, but at the end of the day, he was still beholden to money.

It is our firm belief, nay a conviction which constitutes one of the basic values of a free society to which we are wedded under our Constitution, that there must be freedom not only for the thought that we cherish, but also for the thought that we hate

It's been years, but I still say that I went out with the same progressive values and liberal ideals that I went in with. I made a couple of mistakes, I will honestly admit. In retrospect, there are a few votes I wish I could take back. But, through it all, I kept my support for organized labor, I kept my support for income equality, I kept my support for making sure that kids that come from poor families have access to education. So, yes, I still believe that you don't have to give up your ideals and go along. One person can still stand up and make a difference.

I didn't want to do film or commercials or television. That was cheap. That was selling out. I was the classic liberal, left-wing, 'Theater is going to change the world' kind of person. You know, very, very boring.

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.

In America, one of the great liberal documents of the world is the Declaration of Independence. One of the great conservative documents of the world is the Constitution of the United States. We need both documents to build a country. One to get it started - liberal. And the other to help maintain the structure over the years - conservative.

The president's dream of a worldwide liberal utopia is going to undermine the security of the United States.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

There will instead be a number of fake opposition figures, one of whom is now probably going to be Kseniya Sobchak, which is an absurd idea. I assume she's been chosen because just even the idea of her standing for liberals so makes fun of the idea of liberals and of liberal democracy.

Some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy.

I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.