A Conservative Handbook of Quotations

Seek the truth
Listen to the truth
Teach the truth
Love the truth
Abide by the truth
And defend the truth
Unto death
John Hus (@ 1370 - July 6, 1415)
A Christian martyr burned at the stake
The Hussite Movement in Bohemia, Josef Macek

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.
Martin Luther (1483-1546)

He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
Charles Péguy (1873-1914)

If we believe a thing to be bad, and if we have a right to prevent it, it is our duty to try to prevent it and to damn the consequences.
Lord Milner (1854-1925)

I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Edward E. Hale (1822-1909)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology (1901-1978)

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
Mother Teresa (1910-1997)

Many Christians are reluctant to become involved in public affairs because politics is a "dirty business", but the same people are generally quite happy to go into business life, which is in its way just as "dirty." If the dubious practices and moral compromises of every walk of life were dissected and made known with the glare of publicity which shines on the activities of politicians, then those who like to think that they can keep their hands clean would have very few professions to choose from.
John Lawrence, Hard Facts [1958]

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Our lives begin to end the day we are silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason and justice, tell me I ought to do.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened . . . but do not be silenced.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Silence is the virtue of fools.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

The words of one strong-minded man, addressed to the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.
Billy Graham (1918- )

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher (1925- )

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Never stand so high upon a principle that you cannot lower it to suit the circumstances.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

In critical and baffling situations, it is always best to return to first principle and simple action.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

It is a crime to despair. We must learn to draw from misfortune the means of future strength.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Don't be ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to think.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

For the true is indeed never refuted.
Socrates (469-399 B.C.)
Gorgias 473b

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

For truth there is no deadline.
Heywood Broun (1888-1939)

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now - always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances.
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. Ignorance may deride it. But in the end, there it is.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

I believe that truth is the glue that holds Government together, not only our Government, but civilization itself.
Gerald Ford (1909- )

I suggest this explanation here in general terms, because several critics have recently started up here and there to taunt me with some notion of theirs that authority is only a form of slavery. As a matter of fact, of course, it is the only alternative to slavery. Authority is the other name of right; and unless there is somewhere a right to call us free, any casual free-thinker may choose to call us slaves. And, as I have pointed out, nearly every casual free-thinker does call us slaves. The process of thinking without any reference to authority has left us without any claim to liberty.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

. . . authority . . . is not a thing to be obeyed when it is strong; but, on the contrary, a thing to be obeyed when it is weak.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

If tolerance is a necessary virtue in our democratic society, there must be tolerance for the views of the majority. The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught.
Patrick Buchanan (1938- )

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato (427?-347 B.C.)

The big temptation to conservatives, and especially conservative intellectuals, is self-realizing pessimism. As many rising movements have discovered, it is easier to tear down than build. Conservatism in particular, in its view of human nature and in its recent historical experience, has a strong pessimistic strain. Sometimes conservatives seem unhappy unless they are losing. They need to guard against seizing on a few receding waves as evidence that the tide has turned against them.
Robert L. Bartley
Feb. 09, 1997 - from a collection of essays published under the title "On the Future of Conservatism" by Commentary magazine

I am a conservative man, something which is in itself a confession of pessimism.
Jorge Luis Borges

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Péguy (1873-1914)

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Most people would rather die than think; many do.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
Lord John Emerich Acton (1834-1902)

From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

The Achaians soon experienced, as often happens, that a victorious and powerful ally is but another name for a master.
James Madison (1751-1836) & Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)
Federalist Paper #18

Liberty is the highest political end of man...[but] no country can be free without religion. It creates and strengthens the notion of duty. If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free. The greater the strength of duty, the greater the liberty.
Lord John Emerich Acton (1834-1902)

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. . . . Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)
The Constitution of Liberty

Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. 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 is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Conservatives should be no more timid about asserting the responsibilities of the individual than they should be about protecting individual rights.
Clarence Thomas (1948- )

... conservatives, much more than liberals, are worried about the problem of how do you reconcile democracy, and not just institutional democracy but the real feeling that the mass of the people should rule, with other values that are important. That is a thing that conservatives worry about a lot: How do you reconcile it with liberty and respect for property and respect for traditional religious values?
David Frum
Oct. 30, 1994 - from an interview on the C-SPAN program Booknotes

All government must be structured to protect man from his own worst proclivities. One man’s cruelty is bad enough, but multiplied by millions it produces tyranny. Therefore, because we know there is a wide range of abilities and intelligence, virtues and vices, the raw will of the people as a whole needs to be tempered, or "filtered," by the experience and prudence of the best and wisest among us.
David Frum
Sep. 01, 1997 - from "Conservatism in a Nutshell", published on The Canadian Conservative Forum

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
John G. Diefenbaker (1895-1979)

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
William Allen White (1868-1944)

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
Sidney Hook (1902-1989)

It's ironical that the first people to demand free speech are the first people to deny it to others.
Claude T. Bissell

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
On Revolution

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
On Liberty

But it is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth by being exaggerated into falsehood.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
On Liberty

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside. It is not feelings or commitments that will render a man free, but thoughts, reasoned thoughts.
Allan Bloom (1930-1992)
The Closing of the American Mind

When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.
Confucius (551-479 B.C.)

Without an exhaustive debate, even heated debate, of ideas and programs, free government would weaken and wither. But if we allow ourselves to be persuaded that every individual or party that takes issues with our own convictions is necessarily wicked or treasonous, then, indeed we are approaching the end of freedom's road.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

If fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France (1844-1924)

The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken presuppositions of all thought, and common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

Nothing is more galling than to debate with facts and arguments against a respondent in the belief that one is dealing with his understanding, when in reality one is dealing with his will.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

It is true to say of a religious conviction, of course, that it must primarily be private - that it must be held in the soul before it is applied to the society. It is equally true of a political conviction, or an economic conviction, or any conviction. If this is what he means by calling religion a private affair, there is no such thing as a public affair. But, if he means that the conviction held in the soul cannot be applied to the society, he means manifest and raving nonsense. In other words, if he means that a man's religion cannot have any effect on his citizenship, or on the commonwealth of which he is a citizen. . . . The cosmos, of which we conceive ourselves the creatures, must include the city of which we conceive ourselves the citizens. A man's notion of the world in which he walks must have an effect on the land in which he walks.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

In Germany first they came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character - with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
The Conservative Mind

[The Founding Fathers] understood that republican self-government could not exist if humanity did not possess . . . the traditional "republican virtues" of self-control, self-reliance, and a disinterested concern for the public good.
Irving Kristol (1920- )
Reflections of a Neo-Conservative

Public virtue cannot exist without private virtue.
John Adams (1735-1826)

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

The head rules the belly through the chest - the seat . . . of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. 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. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

[P]ersonal freedom is best maintained . . . when it is ingrained in a people's habits and not enforced against popular policy by the coercion of adjudicated law.
Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965)

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick (1926- )

The intelligent conservative combines a disposition to preserve with an ability to reform.
Russell Kirk (1918-1994)

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Faith in democracy is one thing, blind faith quite another.
Henry Steele Commager (1902- )
"Original Intent and the General Welfare"

In a Democracy:
The Master no longer says, "You shall think as I do, or you shall die;" but he says, "You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people."
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Democracy in America, Part I

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

He who forfeits Liberty for fear of poverty will be a slave forever.
Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

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