Liberalism

Liberalism is for the simple-minded, for those who like to chat a great deal about things they can never achieve. ~ Oswald Spengler

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

• Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.
  • Spiro Agnew, speech before Illinois Republican meeting, Springfield, Illinois (September 10, 1970); reported in Collected Speeches of Spiro Agnew (1971), p. 193

• [W]e claim to start from and to maintain in all our political action this fundamental principle—that the interests of the community as a whole ought to be paramount over the interests of any class, any interest, or any section which that community contains. That is the root and spring of Liberalism.
  • H. H. Asquith, speech in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (30 January 1895), quoted in The Times (31 January 1895), p. 6

B

• He that defers his charity 'till he is dead, is (if a man weighs it rightly) rather liberal of another man's, than of his own.
  • Francis Bacon, Francisci Baconi Baronis de Verulamio … Opera Omnia Quatuor (1730), p. 298. Compare: The English Theophrastus: or, The manners of the age (1702), p. 268: "He that defers Charity till Death, is rather Liberal of another Man's, than of his own".

• The doctrine was liberalism, which criticised and finally demolished the traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community; and asserted instead the primacy of the individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws. From such a belief it followed that the State, instead of being the embodiment of a national community as it had been under the Tudors and the Commonwealth, was required to dwindle into a kind of policeman, standing apart from the national life, and with the merely negative task of keeping the free-for-all of individual competition within the bounds of decorum.
  • Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (1972), p. 91

• The parties which assumed the names of liberals were, or became in due course, simple guardians of capitalism.
  • Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (1899)

• A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
  • Leonard Bernstein, statement of 1953, quoted in A Wonderful Life : 50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit (2006) by Cyrus M. Copeland, p. 190

• He that's liberal
  To all alike, may do a good by chance,
  But never out of judgment.
  • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Spanish Curate, Act I, scene 1

• Liberality consists less in giving a great deal than in gifts well timed.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, in Les Caractères (1688), Aphorism 47 as translated in The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère (1929) by Henri van Laun
  • Variant translations:
  • Liberality consists rather in giving seasonably than much.
  • Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.

C

Reality has a well-known liberal bias. ~ Stephen Colbert

• What do we mean by this Liberalism of which we talk? … I should say it means the acknowledgement in practical life of the truth that men are best governed who govern themselves; that the general sense of mankind, if left alone, will make for righteousness; that artificial privileges and restraints upon freedom, so far as they are not required in the interests of the community, are hurtful; and that the laws, while, of course, they cannot equalise conditions, can, at least, avoid aggravating inequalities, and ought to have for their object the securing to every man the best chance he can have of a good and useful life.
  • Henry Campbell-Bannerman, The Liberal Magazine (January 1898), p. 530, quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Constable, 1973), p. 232

• In retrospect it was important to have sincere liberals around. Someone needs to fret about the excesses of capitalism. When liberals stopped doing that, the country lost a needed counterbalance. In an ecosystem, every species has a role to play, even the pests. If you succeeded in eliminating the mosquitos, birds would starve. When the last liberal stopped sobbing about unfairness, American society became less fair.
  • Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018)
• Liberalism, for all its virtues, has begun to develop a sense of entitlement, and needs time to rediscover its soul.
  • Stephen L. Carter, Trump and the Fall of Liberalism, Bloomberg L.P. (November 11, 2016)

• Liberalism in its political instantiation, for all of its appeal, is so powerful a theory that it probably works better in opposition than in government. Modern liberalism has become what liberal philosophers not long ago would have derided as a “comprehensive view” — a theory that believes itself able to give an account of how every institution of the society should operate, and even, alas, how people should think. Add to that a dash of triumphalism, and you wind up with a government impatient with the tendency of human beings to resist having too much forced on them at once.
  • Stephen L. Carter, Trump and the Fall of Liberalism, Bloomberg L.P. (November 11, 2016)

• Humanity cannot be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal.
  • Voltairine de Cleyre, "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation" (1893).

• Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
  • Stephen Colbert, in his address at the Hilton Washington hotel, Washington, D.C. (29 April 2006)

• I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices.
  • Stephen Colbert "Fresh Air" NPR interview (24 January 2005)

• [John Casey] claimed that the liberal tradition was defective in its explanation of the citizen's attachment to the state itself since it ignored his patriotic allegiance to the "continuity of institutions, shared experience, language, custom and kinship" which the state presupposed. What was pernicious...Casey was saying, was that it had undermined such pieties and replaced them with a "rootless individualism".
  • Charles Covell, The Redefinition of Conservatism: Politics and Doctrine (1986), pp. 27-28

• Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics.
  • Maurice Cowling, quoted in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 136

D

• The tone and tendency of Liberalism cannot be long concealed. It is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of Reform, and to make war on the manners and customs of the people of this country under the pretext of Progress.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, speech to the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in Crystal Palace, London (24 June 1872), quoted in Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, Volume II, ed. T. E. Kebbel (1882), p. 524

E

• That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end , as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), pp. 15–16

• In the sense in which Liberalism is contrasted with Conservatism, both can be equally repellent: if the former can mean chaos, the latter can mean petrification. We are always faced both with the question 'what must be destroyed?' and with the question 'what must be preserved?' and neither Liberalism nor Conservatism, which are not philosophies and may be merely habits, is enough to guide us.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 17

• I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

• Any liberal system must proceed from the assumption that freedom is one and indivisible and that elementary human freedom in all spheres of life must go hand in hand with political, religious, economic and spiritual freedom. The strategy of collectivist thinking has always been to split up this most essential and most universal of human values as a means of making inroads into the free system itself.
  • Ludwig Erhard, The Economics of Success (1963), pp. 291–292

F

• I am a Liberal, because liberalism seems to me to mean faith in the people, and confidence that they will manage their own affairs far better than those affairs are likely to be managed for them by others.
  • Millicent Fawcett, quoted in Why I Am a Liberal: Being Definitions and Personal Confessions of Faith by the Best Minds of the Liberal Party, ed. Andrew Reid (1885), p. 43

• Liberalism, moreover, which currently plays a dominant role in the life of European peoples and states, is by no means to be understood as the system of popular freedom in general, but as a system in the special interest of quite specific elements of society which are assembled in the commercial and industrial middle class. The liberal state in this conventional sense is the state which represents the interest of this social group. But that does not in any sense mean that it must also represent the interest of all other classes of the population or even only the interest of the true majority of the people.
  • Julius Fröbel, Theorie der Politik, als Ergebniss einer erneuerten Prüfung demokratischer Lehrmeinungen (2 vols., 1861–1864), Vol. I, p. 258, quoted in Theodore S. Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 1858–1871, Volume I: Ideas and Institutions (1969), p. 136

• [T]here are two justifications for it. One... is pragmatic and the other... is moral. The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is... a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf... as a result of the European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation.
  • Francis Fukuyama, 2020 Owen Harries Lecture (2020) as quoted in a YouTube Creative Commons video, 7:53.

• In the Thirty Years' War... a third of the population of central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects, and the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends [defined by religions] out of political discussion... and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself, and not "the good life"... as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion, and therefore tolerance of diversity, of people that don't believe the same thing that you do, has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another.
  • Francis Fukuyama, 2020 Owen Harries Lecture (2020) as quoted in a YouTube Creative Commons video, 8:28.

G

The white liberal's offer to help has an air of condescension because it masks a profound existential investment in the continuation of the racist system. ~ Lewis Gordon

• It came to me a little while ago what we really are, we liberals. We demand reforms, we want to improve the situation of the underprivileged — why? To make them better off materially? Nuts. It's only to make ourselves feel less guilty. We rend our garments, we're eager to show how willing we are to accept any outrageous demand so long as it's black, or youthful, or put up by someone who thinks he's got a grievance. We want to appease everybody — you know what a liberal is? A liberal is a guy who walks out of the room when the fight starts.
  • Brian Garfield, Death Wish (1972), Ch. 7, p. 68

• I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence.
  • William Ewart Gladstone, speech at the opening of the Palmerston Club, Oxford (December 1878) as quoted in "Gladstone's Conundrums; The Statesman Answers Sundry Interesting Questions" in The New York Times (9 February 1879)

• Much of Biko's energy is devoted to criticizing the liberal in both the condescending white and the idiotic black forms. The black liberal is idiotic because black people lack power in a white-controlled system. The white liberal, on the other hand, operates from the vantage point of having something—perhaps a great deal—to lose in the event of progressive social change. The white liberal's offer to help has an air of condescension because it masks a profound existential investment in the continuation of the racist system. Thus, the white liberal always insists on offering the theoretical or interpretive strategies against antiblack racism, but such strategies often act to preserve the need for white liberals as the most cherished members or overseers of values in their society. In Biko's words: "I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white man a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that.)"
  • Lewis Gordon, describing the view of Steve Biko, introduction to I Write What I Like, p. vii

H

Liberalism regards it as desirable that only what the majority accepts should in fact be law, but it does not believe that this is therefore necessarily good law. Its aim, indeed, is to persuade the majority to observe certain principles. It accepts majority rule as a method of deciding, but not as an authority for what the decision ought to be. ~ Friedrich Hayek

• Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil. […] When I returned to America [from India], social conservatives no longer seemed so crazy.
  • Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 126–127

• The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world.
  • William Harcourt, speech in Oxford town hall (30 December 1872), quoted in The Times (31 December 1872), p. 5

• Liberalism is a doctrine about what the law ought to be, democracy a doctrine about the manner of determining the law. Liberalism regards it as desirable that only what the majority accepts should in fact be law, but it does not believe that this is therefore necessarily good law. Its aim, indeed, is to persuade the majority to observe certain principles. It accepts majority rule as a method of deciding, but not as an authority for what the decision ought to be. To the doctrinaire democrat the fact that the majority wants something is sufficient ground for regarding it as good; for him the will of the majority determines not only what is law but what is good law.
  • Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: 1960), pp. 103-104

• Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, are revoked on the inevitable road to capitalist slavery. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study for proof of Luxemburg’s observation.

  The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.

  • Chris Hedges, "Reform or Revolution," May 22, 2016

• A liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she will call the police.
  • Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass (2009), p. ix
• It is a false liberalism that interprets itself into the government operation of commercial business.  Every step of bureaucratizing of the business of our country poisons the very roots of liberalism -- that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.  It is the road not to more liberty, but to less liberty.  Liberalism should be found not striving to spread bureaucracy but striving to set bounds to it.  True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of all other blessings and benefits is vain.  That belief is the foundation of all American progress, political as well as economic. Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit, a force proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.  Even if governmental conduct of business could give us more efficiency instead of less efficiency, the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated.  It would destroy political equality.  It would increase rather than decrease abuse and corruption.  It would stifle initiative and invention.  It would undermine the development of leadership.  It would cramp and cripple the mental and spiritual energies of our people.  It would extinguish equality and opportunity.  It would dry up the spirit of liberty and progress.  For these reasons primarily it must be resisted.  For a hundred and fifty years liberalism has found its true spirit in the American system, not in the European systems.
  • Herbert Hoover, Campaign Speech, 22 October 1928

• A Liberal is one who seeks to secure for everyone the same rights, political, social or religious, which he claims for himself.
  • George Holyoake, quoted in Ian Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (1980), p. 76

I

• But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.
  • Isaiah 32:8, The Bible (King James Version)

K

• Tarian: A liberal is just the opposite of a conservative.
  Herrod: (Entering, with drinks.) And a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged.
  Tarian: Oh, Rex. Thanks. For the drinks and for the definition. But couldn't you also say a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested?
  • Peter Kreeft (1983-07-13). The Unaborted Socrates: A Dramatic Debate on the Issues Surrounding Abortion. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity. p. 93. 
• A liberal is one who says that it's all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid the minimum wage.
  • Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978)

• When then is liberalism correctly understood? Liberalism is not an exclusvely political term. It can be applied to a prison reform, to an economic order, to a theology. Within the political framework, the question is not (as in a democracy) “Who should rule?” but “How should rule be exercised?” The reply is “Regardless of who rules—a monarch, an elite, a majority, or a benevolent dictator—governments should be exercised in such a way that each citizen enjoys the greatest amount of personal liberty.” The limit of liberty is obviously the common good. But, admittedly, the common good (material as well as immaterial) is not easily defined, for it rests on value judgments. Its definition is therefore always somewhat arbitrary. Speed limits curtail freedom in the interests of the common good. Is there a watertight case for forty, forty-five, or fifty miles an hour? Certainly not. ... Freedom is thus the only postulate of liberalism—of genuine liberalism. If, therefore, democracy is liberal, the life, the whims, the interests of the minority will be just as respected as those of the majority. Yet surely not only a democracy, but a monarchy (absolute or otherwise) or an aristocratic (elitist) regime can be liberal. In fact, the affinity between democracy and liberalism is not at all greater than that between, say, monarchy and liberalism or a mixed government and liberalism. (People under the Austrian monarchy, which was not only symbolic but an effective mixed government, were not less free than those in Canada, to name only one example.)
  • Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 21

L

• [L]iberalism has been, in the last four centuries, the outstanding doctrine of Western Civilisation.
  • Harold Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation [1936] (1962), p. 5

• The world crisis which began in 1929, the longest ever known, caused people entirely unconnected with and even hostile to the working-class movement to speak of 'crisis' and even of the 'collapse of capitalism'. [...] Liberalism observed with horror that the actual course of world development ignored all its good advice. Today the doctrine of liberalism is practically dead, but, at least, its few remaining defenders can console themselves by noting the disastrous effects of economic nationalism.
  • Lucien Laurat, Marxism and Democracy, 1940, published by the Left Book Club, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London; translated by Edward Fitzgerald. Text online at the Marxists Internet Archive.

• But then the inevitable reaction set in, sparked by the liberal curse of being able, however belatedly, to see both sides of any question.
  • Fritz Leiber, The Oldest Soldier, in George H. Scithers & Darrell Schweitzer (eds.) Another Round at the Spaceport Bar, p. 106. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1960

• Liberalism itself is, on all matters connected with Church and Education, only a kind of corporate and 'respectable' ungodliness.
  • Henry Liddon, letter to C. T. Redington (January 13, 1879), in John Octavius Johnston, Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), p. 229

• New Deal liberalism broke with progressivism in many if not most respects. Progressives wanted technocratic economic planning. By the 1940s, New Dealers dropped planning for Keynesianism. Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds. New Deal liberals celebrated the melting pot and liberalized American immigration laws in the 1960s. Woodrow Wilson resegegrated Washington. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Franklin D. Roosevelt created Social Security and Johnson created Medicare. Wilson opposed national health insurance.
  • Michael Lind, "Glenn Beck’s partisan historians", Salon, Apr 6, 2010

• As to the having and possessing of things, teach them to part with what they have, easily and freely to their friends, and let them find by experience that the most liberal has always the most plenty, with esteem and commendation to boot, and they will quickly learn to practise it.
  • John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) Sec. 110

• Covetousness, and the desire of having in our possession, and under our dominion, more than we have need of, being the root of all evil, should be early and carefully weeded out, and the contrary quality of a readiness to impart to others, implanted. This should be encourag'd by great commendation and credit, and constantly taking care that he loses nothing by his liberality.
  • John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) Sec. 110

• Let him sensibly perceive, that the kindness he shews to others, is no ill husbandry for himself; but that it brings a return in kindness both from those that receive it, and those who look on. Make this a contest among children, who shall out-do one another in this way: and by this means, by a constant practise, children having made it easy to themselves to part with what they have, good nature may be settled in them into a habit, and they may take pleasure, and pique themselves in being kind, liberal and civil, to others.
  • John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) Sec. 110

M

• Liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude.
  • Mao Zedong, "Combat Liberalism" (1937)
• Liberalism, as a set of ideals, is still viable, and even compelling to Western men. That is one reason why it has become a common denominator of American political rhetoric; but there is another reason. The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. Everybody can easily agree on general ends; it is more difficult to agree on means and the relevance of various means to the ends articulated. The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.
  • C. Wright Mills, "Liberal Values in the Modern World"

• The project of liberalism in the broadest sense is to ensure personal liberty.
  • Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations. AK Press. 1 May 2010. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-84935-029-7. 

• Let's run it on down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It just could make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and white women–with men relating to that as best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant, or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or "coin" as well). Goodbye to all that.
  • Robin Morgan, "Goodbye to All That" (1970) in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (1977), p 123

• Define it as we may, faith in Progress has been the mainspring of Liberalism in all its schools and branches.
  • John Morley, 'Democracy and Reaction', Miscellanies: Fourth Series (1908), p. 293

• Respect for the dignity and worth of the individual is its root. It stands for pursuit of social good against class interest or dynastic interest. It stands for the subjection to human judgment of all claims of external authority, whether in an organised Church, or in more loosely gathered societies of believers, or in books held sacred. In law-making it does not neglect the higher characteristics of human nature, it attends to them first. In executive administration, though judge, gaoler, and perhaps the hangman will be indispensable, still mercy is counted a wise supplement to terror.
  • John Morley, Recollections: Volume I (1917), p. 21

• Liberalism cannot be defined in the abstract in any helpful way. Liberalism in politics can best be defined in terms of specific issues. Political liberalism should also be defined in terms of objectives. A major objective is the protection of the economic weak and doing it within the framework of a private-property economy. The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.
  • Wayne Morse, U.S. senator, New Republic (22 July 1946)

N

• Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word.
  • John Henry Newman, Note A, ‘Liberalism’ (1865), quoted in Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (1967), pp. 255–56

O

• Hungary was led to bankruptcy by a government of former communists pursuing liberal policy. This example strengthens the conviction that in fact there is no such thing as a liberal: a liberal is nothing more than a communist with a university degree. If we had taken their advice, right now Hungary would be in the intensive care ward, with the tubes of IMF and Brussels credit attached to every limb. And the fingers on the valves regulating the flow of credit would belong to George Soros. This is no exaggeration.
  • Viktor Orbán, State of the Nation speech (2020)

P

• Too many well-meaning liberals are clinging with ten fingernails to the idea that their institutions are robust enough to withstand fascism. They believe, because the belief is soothing, that the marketplace of ideas cares about the value, durability, and quality of its wares rather than how shiny the packaging is, how catchy the jingle, how many times it shows up in your peripheral brand awareness until it’s the one you reach for on the shelf.
  • Laurie Penny, No, I Will Not Debate You

• Moderate liberalism cherishes the idea of “civility” because it allows it to believe in its own goodness and relevance.
  • Laurie Penny, No, I Will Not Debate You

R

• Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society.
  • John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 6

S

Liberalism, however, means "the state for itself, and every man for himself." That is a formula impossible to follow unless one is willing to take the liberal course, which is to say one thing while being dead set against its opposite, but in the end to let the opposite take over anyway. ~ Oswald Spengler

• Dealing with the Liberals, it was like trying to grab quicksilver.
  • Alex Salmond, Alex Salmond: The new king of Scotland, The Independent (9 August 2008)

• The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hopes that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion. Dictatorship is the opposite of discussion.
  • Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1985), translated by George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

• I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials.
  • Tom Sharpe, Porterhouse Blue (1974)

• It is an inevitable mark of what the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns used to call the ‘tyranny of liberalism’ that the liberal is not only convinced that he is right; he is also convinced that other people secretly agree with him—how could they do otherwise?—and are only restrained from saying so by unworthy motives arising from worldly prudence, material interest, and so forth.
  • C. H. Smyth, 'The Importance of Church Attendance' in The Recall to Religion (1937), p. 120

• Among the political attitudes that prevail in Germany today, only socialism has the potentiality of inner value and integrity. Liberalism is for the simple-minded, for those who like to chat a great deal about things they can never achieve. That is how we Germans are; we cannot possibly be like the English, we can only be caricatures of them—and that we have been often enough. Every man for himself: that is an English idea. Every man for every other man: that is the Prussian way. Liberalism, however, means "the state for itself, and every man for himself." That is a formula impossible to follow unless one is willing to take the liberal course, which is to say one thing while being dead set against its opposite, but in the end to let the opposite take over anyway.

• Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism 1919, translated by Donald O. White

• We must face the fact that, though the free intelligence and the spirit of community are at once the goal and an essential means, they may be not only ineffectual but actually harmful, unless they are combined with a full measure of that hot indignation against tyranny, that devoted service in the struggle for the new order, which is characteristic of the best minds of the political Left. On the other hand, the political Left, if it is to capture the imagination and allegiance of the people of this country and sweep them forward to victory, must, I believe, learn a more liberal spirit. I mean, of course, liberal not in the political but in the cultural sense, namely, loyalty to the free critical intelligence and respect for the human individual.
  • Olaf Stapledon, Philosophy and Living (1939)

T

• Liberalism only works when citizens see and treat each other as individuals with equal value and rights regardless of their gender, religion, sexual orientation or skin color. The famous dream of Martin Luther King seems almost painfully antiquated these days.
  • Michael Totten, "The New Socialist Realists" (4 November 2016), City Journal
• As Part IV of this book will chart, the financial and economic crisis of 2007–2012 morphed between 2013 and 2017 into a comprehensive political and geopolitical crisis of the post–cold war order. And the obvious political implication should not be dodged. Conservatism might have been disastrous as a crisis-fighting doctrine, but events since 2012 suggest that the triumph of centrist liberalism was false too. As the remarkable escalation of the debate about inequality in the United States has starkly exposed, centrist liberals struggle to give convincing answers for the long-term problems of modern capitalist democracy. The crisis added to those preexisting tensions of increasing inequality and disenfranchisement, and the dramatic crisis-fighting measures adopted since 2008, for all their short-term effectiveness, have their own, negative side effects. On that score the conservatives were right. Meanwhile, the geopolitical challenges thrown up, not by the violent turmoil of the Middle East or “Slavic” backwardness but by the successful advance of globalization, have not gone away. They have intensified. And though the “Western alliance” is still in being, it is increasingly uncoordinated. In 2014 Japan lurched toward confrontation with China. And the EU—the colossus that “does not do geopolitics”—“sleepwalked” into conflict with Russia over Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the wake of the botched handling of the eurozone crisis, Europe witnessed a dramatic mobilization on both Left and Right. But rather than being taken as an expression of the vitality of European democracy in the face of deplorable governmental failure, however disagreeable that expression may in some cases be, the new politics of the postcrisis period were demonized as “populism,” tarred with the brush of the 1930s or attributed to the malign influence of Russia. The forces of the status quo gathered in the Eurogroup set out to contain and then to neutralize the left-wing governments elected in Greece and Portugal in 2015. Backed up by the newly enhanced powers of the fully activated ECB, this left no doubt about the robustness of the eurozone. All the more pressing were the questions about the limits of democracy in the EU and its lopsidedness. Against the Left, preying on its reasonableness, the brutal tactics of containment did their job. Against the Right they did not, as Brexit, Poland and Hungary were to prove.
  • Adam Tooze Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018)

• The key-note of all Liberalism [is] the paramount and unlimited authority of popular control.
  • George Trevelyan, lecture (1871), quoted in Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (1971), p. 249

• Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.
  • Pierre Trudeau, Defining liberalism at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention, as quoted in "History of the Liberal Party of Canada" (PDF at the Liberal Party website)

W

• The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
  • George Washington, From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790, National Archives and Records Administration.

• I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans.
  • James G. Watt, in a statement of November 1981, quoted in New York Times (10 October 1983); also quoted in Energy and Environment : The Unfinished Business (1986) by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., p. 91

• It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in The Illuminati Papers (1980), p. 111

• What bothers me about today's "liberals" is this: through the ages, those called liberal fought to take the power away from the kings and the emperors and to give it to the parliaments; now it is the "liberals" who are anxious to give more and more power to the executive, at the expense of the legislative branch.
  • Burton K. Wheeler, Yankee from the West (1962), chapter 19, p. 428

See also

• Capitalism
• Liberal economy
• Liberal democracy
• Neoliberalism

Social and political philosophy
Ideologies	Anarchism ⦿ Aristocratic Radicalism (Nietzsche • Brandes...) ⦿ Autarchism ⦿ Ba'athism (• Aflaq • al-Assad • Hussein) ⦿ Communism ⦿ (Neo-)Confucianism ⦿ Conservatism ⦿ Constitutionalism ⦿ Dark Enlightenment ⦿ Environmentalism ⦿ Fascism (• Islamo- • Eco- • Francoism...) vs. Nazism ⦿ Feminism (• Anarcha- • Radical • Gender-critical • Second-wave...) ⦿ Formalism/(Neo-)cameralism ⦿ Freudo-Marxism ⦿ Gaddafism/Third International Theory ⦿ Legalism ⦿ Leninism/Vanguardism ⦿ Juche (• Kim Il-sung • Kim Jong Il • Kim Jong Un...) ⦿ Liberalism ⦿ Libertarianism/Laissez-faire Capitalism ⦿ Maoism ⦿ Marxism ⦿ Mohism ⦿ Republicanism ⦿ Social democracy ⦿ Socialism ⦿ Stalinism ⦿ Straussianism ⦿ Syndicalism ⦿ Xi Jinping thought ⦿ New Monasticism (• MacIntyre • Dreher...)
Modalities	Absolutism vs. Social constructionism/Relativism ⦿ Autarky/Autonomy vs. Heteronomy ⦿ Authoritarianism/Totalitarianism ⦿ Colonialism vs. Imperialism ⦿ Communitarianism vs. Liberalism ⦿ Elitism vs. Populism/Majoritarianism/Egalitarianism ⦿ Individualism vs. Collectivism ⦿ Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism ⦿ Particularism vs. Universalism ⦿ Modernism/Progressivism vs. Postmodernism ⦿ Reactionism/Traditionalism vs. Futurism/Transhumanism
Concepts	Alienation ⦿ Anarcho-tyranny ⦿ Anomie ⦿ Authority ⦿ Conquest's Laws of Politics ⦿ Duty ⦿ Eugenics ⦿ Elite ⦿ Elite theory ⦿ Emancipation ⦿ Equality ⦿ Freedom ⦿ Government ⦿ Hegemony ⦿ Hierarchy ⦿ Iron law of oligarchy ⦿ Justice ⦿ Law ⦿ Monopoly ⦿ Natural law ⦿ Noblesse oblige ⦿ Norms ⦿ Obedience ⦿ Peace ⦿ Pluralism ⦿ Polyarchy ⦿ Power ⦿ Propaganda ⦿ Property ⦿ Revolt ⦿ Rebellion ⦿ Revolution ⦿ Rights ⦿ Ruling class ⦿ Social contract ⦿ Social inequality ⦿ Society ⦿ State ⦿ Tocqueville effect ⦿ Totalitarian democracy ⦿ War ⦿ Utopia
Government	Aristocracy ⦿ Autocracy ⦿ Bureaucracy ⦿ Dictatorship ⦿ Democracy ⦿ Meritocracy ⦿ Monarchy ⦿ Ochlocracy ⦿ Oligarchy ⦿ Plutocracy ⦿ Technocracy ⦿ Theocracy ⦿ Tyranny

External links

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

Liberalism