Everything You Need to Know About Being a Conservative in 75 Quotes

You want to REALLY understand conservatism?

One of the problems with conservatism in the modern world is that many people just don’t understand it, even including some people on the Right.

That’s because there are a lot of what I think of as “instinctual conservatives.” Maybe mom and dad were Republicans, they like America, and they like guns. Maybe on top of that, they listen to a little talk radio and Fox News, but they don’t necessarily have a deeper understanding of the first principles that make up conservatism. That’s okay. It’s nothing to feel bad about, but once you understand the principles behind it, then suddenly, certain ideas and policies start to make a lot more sense.

On the Left, almost everything most liberals know about conservatism is fed to them by people who hate conservatives. Everything is twisted, manipulated, and reimagined in the darkest, cruelest, worst way possible to try to give people a false impression of what conservatives believe in. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about propaganda. It’s smearing the Right so people will never understand it and go, “That makes a lot of sense. They may have a point worth debating there.”

In addition, over time, different issues have become more prominent. Then there’s the confusion that results when some people that call themselves conservatives don’t necessarily live up to the principles that we espouse. These days, we also often see "conservatism" and "liberalism" defined more by what they hate about the other side, rather than what they actually bring to the table. That’s why it’s a good idea to collect quotes that get down to the roots of conservative beliefs. Feel free to disagree with any of them in the comments section, add your own thoughts, or alternately, if you like the list, share it with some people. The more people that understand conservatism in America, the better off the country will be.

1) "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." -- John Adams

2) "A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." -- Samuel Adams

3) "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence." -- Anonymous, but often attributed to George Washington

4) "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Anonymous

5) "Don’t look in other people’s pockets. You have no business there. What they earn is theirs. What you earn is yours. Keep it that way. Nobody owes you anything, except to respect your privacy and leave you the hell alone." -- Neal Boortz

6) "Barring extreme physical and mental disabilities, each and every one of us is where we are today — be it poor or wealthy, happy or sad, on the streets or in a condo, in a Mercedes or a rusted-out Pinto — because of the choices we have made during our lives. It’s the choices we have made that put us where we are, not the choices others have made for us." -- Neal Boortz

7) "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." -- William F. Buckley

8) "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." -- Edmund Burke

9) "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." -- G.K. Chesterton

10) "Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country." -- Calvin Coolidge

11) "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!" -- Steven Decatur

12) "No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." -- Will and Ariel Durant

13) "It is not strange… to mistake change for progress." -- Millard Fillmore

14) "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." -- Ben Franklin

15) "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben Franklin

16) "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So, if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property." -- Milton Friedman

17) "I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible." -- Milton Friedman

18) "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand." -- Milton Friedman

19) "The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly — whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world." -- Milton Friedman

20) "Indeed, as libertarians are fond of pointing out, pretty much all laws come with the implicit threat of violence. Don't believe me? Refuse to obey even the most picayune law and eventually a man in uniform with a gun on his hip is going to come talk to you about it." -- Jonah Goldberg

21) "Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." -- Barry Goldwater

22) "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." -- Benjamin Harrison

23) "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here." -- Patrick Henry

24) "There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended, and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement." -- Eric Hoffer

25) "That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves." -- Thomas Jefferson

26) "A rising tide (in the economy) lifts all boats." -- John F. Kennedy

27) "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." -- Martin Luther King

28) "Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm." -- Russell Kirk

29) "Our Founding Fathers knew that without Second Amendment freedom, all of our freedoms could be in jeopardy." -- Wayne LaPierre

30) “We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens.” – Mark Levin

31) "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies." -- C.S. Lewis

32) "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." -- C.S. Lewis

33) "You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society." -- C.S. Lewis

34) "Progress is not striving for economic justice or fairness, but economic growth." -- Rush Limbaugh

35) "Compassion is defined not by how many people are on the government dole but by how many people no longer need government assistance." -- Rush Limbaugh

36) "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison

37) “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” – James Madison

38) "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill

39) "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." -- George Orwell

40) "When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans." -- Ron Paul

41) "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -- P.J. O'Rourke

42) "There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't?" -- P.J. O'Rourke

43) "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." -- Tom Paine

44) "With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you're going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses." -- Rand Paul

45) "Correction and discipline are good for children. If they have their own way, they will make their mothers ashamed of them." -- Proverbs 29:15

46) "The best way to help your neighbor is not to live off your neighbor." -- Alfonzo Rachel

47) "We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission, which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." -- Ayn Rand

48) "We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much." -- Ronald Reagan

49) "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" -- Ronald Reagan

50) "Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process." -- Ronald Reagan

51)  "I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts." -- Ronald Reagan

52) "Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood — the virtues that made America." -- Teddy Roosevelt

53) "Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families." -- Benjamin Rush

54) "The modern tragedy is not that human beings give way more often to their passions now than in previous ages, but that, in leaving the right road, they deny that there is a right road. People rebelled against God in other ages, but they recognized it as rebellion. They sinned, but they knew that they sinned. They saw clearly they were on the wrong road; today people throw away the map." -- Fulton Sheen

55) "Sins do not become virtues by being widely practiced. Right is still right if nobody is right, and wrong is still wrong if everybody is wrong." -- Fulton Sheen

56) "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." -- Adam Smith

57) "Tolerant, but not stupid! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn’t mean you have to approve of it! …"Tolerate" means you’re just putting up with it! You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on the airplane or, or you tolerate a bad cold. It can still piss you off!" -- South Park

58) "There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs." -- Thomas Sowell

59) "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- Thomas Sowell

60) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind." -- Thomas Sowell

61) "Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common-sense fact is routinely ignored." -- Thomas Sowell

62) "Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks - drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for healthcare, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives." -- Mark Steyn

63)  "The defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. This point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (Now Lord) Healey, many years ago: 'Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperiled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.'" -- Margaret Thatcher

64) "…The larger the slice taken by government, the smaller the cake available for everyone." -- Margaret Thatcher

65) "Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty; every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book's words), regulation should not 'be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly'" -- Margaret Thatcher

66) "I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights." -- Clarence Thomas

67) "My new friends knew better. They understood what mattered: family, home, church, friends." -- Clarence Thomas

68) "The America Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

69) "To be prepared for War is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." -- George Washington

70) "Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals." -- George Washington

71) "Sure, I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure, I love my country with all her faults. I’m not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be." -- John Wayne

72) "In general, presidents and congressmen have very limited power to do good for the economy and awesome power to do bad. The best good thing that politicians can do for the economy is to stop doing bad. In part, this can be achieved through reducing taxes and economic regulation and staying out of our lives." -- Walter Williams

73) "Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty." -- Walter Williams

74) "In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves." -- Walter Williams

75)  "Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man." -- Walter Williams

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