Yquotes.com

 

In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.
--
p. vii

 

Camille Paglia

» Camille Paglia - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

We see that all of Islam, all of its practices & beliefs were not presented by the Prophet in the first year, but rather presented over a period of 23 years. He presented them in a gradual way. First he presented the idea of monotheism. For 3 years he added nothing to the admonition, "Say: 'God is One,' & be saved." What is the prescribed fast? pilgrimage? poor-due? These had not as yet been presented. Thus the people who accepted Islam in the first 3 years and came to believe in the oneness of God and died were possibly people who drank wine, did not perform the prescribed fast, had not performed the prescribed pilgrimage & had not participated in the struggle in God's way [jihad]. His method was to gradually present Islam. He first presented an intellectual world view.

 

Ali Shariati

 

We Americans have a long history of fighting "big," wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight "big" again is not something new.
It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of "intellectual property." Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called "property" is not well exercised within this tradition anymore.
If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy.

 

Lawrence Lessig

 

There is a process of slow modification and development mainly in directions which I view with misgiving. "Tory democracy," the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the Conservative party in which I was bred, than it is like Liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism...applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the old Conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests. The Liberalism of to-day is better...yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they called construction,—that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man. Both the one and the other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years.

 

William Ewart Gladstone

 

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

National Socialism is the fulfillment of Continental "liberalism" which stems largely from Rousseau […] The continental Liberals never were liberals in the English sense [i.e., never were classical liberals]; their "liberalism" was nothing else but the struggle against the existing order and the old tradition. Foolishly enough the English Liberals supported their continental "coreligionists," never being fully aware of the abyss which actually divided them.

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau