Liberal Quotes - page 46
![...For natural science he [Otto von Bismarck] shewed little interest, and indeed at that time it scarcely could be reckoned among the ordinary subjects of education; philosophy he pursued rather as a man than as a student, and we are not surprised to find that it was Spinoza rather than Kant or Fichte or Hegel to whom he devoted most attention, for he cared more for principles of belief and the conduct of life than the analysis of the intellect.
...He [Otto von Bismarck] astonished his friends by the amount and variety of his reading; it was at this time that he studied Spinoza. It is said that he had among his friends the reputation of being a liberal; it is probable enough that he said and did many things which they did not understand; and anything they did not understand would be attributed to liberalism by the country gentlemen of Pomerania; partly no doubt it was due to the fact that in 1843 he came back from Paris wearing a beard. (Baruch Spinoza)](https://static.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images/00/baruch-spinoza-amount-analysis-1015200.jpg)
Max Lerner, an educator, journalist and student of American civilization who was for many years a syndicated columnist for The New York Post, died yesterday... He was 89 ... Mr. Lerner was one of the more conspicuous of the post-World War II nonfiction writers, a humanist whose unabashed liberal conscience led him to the political barricades for more than three decades. Many of his concerns now seem prescient. In 1959, for example, in a speech at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Lerner called for the formation of an antiwar elite, making it clear that he was worried about what he saw as growing mediocrity among American students.
Max Lerner
I think Ushant describes it pretty well, with that epigraph from Tom Brown's School Days: "I'm the poet of White Horse Vale, sir, with Liberal notions under my cap!” For some reason those lines stuck in my head, and I've never forgotten them. This image became something I had to be. ... I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort - I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form - all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. And to study all the vowel effects and all the consonant effects and the variation in vowel sounds.
Conrad Aiken
You know what you think, you know where you are on the spectrum... You're Left or you're Right really, that's it. And if you're left-wing, you're boring. That's the truth. Nobody wants to hang around with you, you're very dull. You're the voice of conscience, y'know the one saying: "Now look. Put it down, we should all be nice to one another. Let's try and not eat everything today.” Very dull voice... The right-wing... Cruel? Yes. Vicious? Certainly. But honest. Not a sophisticated philosophy, it just says: "What is this? Do we fuck it or eat it? Let's try half and half.”... Now you might be liberal! You could be, I forgot. You could be one of those thoughtful, troublesome people. People who say: "Well things are actually a little bit like this AND a little bit like that. Soooo, let's do whatever you say.” If you're liberal, you have no purpose. You are the thing in your kitchen you never use. Something you bought once, while you were out at a market feeling frisky.
Dylan Moran
Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.
Roger Scruton
Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.
Mark Ames
In my first speech in 1996 I said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians. This was not said out of disrespect for Asians but was meant as a slap in the face to both the Liberal and Labor governments who opened the floodgates to immigration, targeting cultures purely for the vote, as expressed by former Labor minister Barry Jones - to such an extent that society changed too rapidly due to migrants coming in the front door but also the back door, via New Zealand.
Pauline Hanson
[D]emocracy is not in imminent jeopardy but American liberal democracy-predicated on the rule of law, individual rights, and tolerance for dissent-does seem up for grabs in a way it has never been in my lifetime. The willful trashing of U.S. postwar grand strategy takes us anew into a world based not on a U.S.-led Western rules-based order, but on a ragged concert of great powers with zones of influence in which power-based relationships alone define relations between big and small nations. We've been there before and we're still here to tell of it-but earlier epochs of balance-of-power realism did not proceed in a world with nuclear weapons.
Adam Garfinkle
They say great minds think alike. That's also true of tiny minds, and it's especially true of closed ones. I'm always impressed by students who know so much about the world they feel no need to listen to anyone else's opinions, aren't you? Especially when they feel compelled to actively shout them down. That's confidence for you. ... Anyone who's unwilling to hear an opposing opinion has no business attending a university, unless they're planning to graduate with honors in bigotry. And they have no business teaching at one either. There's nothing liberal, intelligent, enlightened, civilized or progressive about shutting somebody up because you don't want other people to hear their opinions. Who are you to decide who should and shouldn't be heard? Who made you emperor? It's not only an incitement to public disorder, it's a form of assault and a violation of the civil rights of everyone around you.
Pat Condell
In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.
Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is "unleashing the dark forces of violence" in the United States. Unleashing them?
John Pilger
I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider - and also FOX News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. ... We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other FOX/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father ...
Bill Maher
My politics have not changed. I am an old school liberal... when we're talking about the race issue, they changed, not me... We should be moving towards a colorblind society where we don't see race. That is the old way to look at it. I think that is still a good way to look at. That how we win, when it doesn't matter what your race is--the quality of your character, not the color of your skin. That's not wokism. Wokism we have to see it everywhere all the time.
Bill Maher
I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball.
Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt Vonnegut
In divided Germany you had liberal democracy versus communism. In divided Korea it's moderate versus radical Korean nationalism, a difference of degree inside one big ideological community. It's a huge difference, of course, but moderates always feel a certain admiration for radicals in all ideologies and religions. This admiration has been reflected in movies here that show North Korean women as purer, more chaste, and North Korean men as more resolute, handsome, and cooler than their South Korean counterparts. This year we have seen North Korean defectors appear in films as criminals or even murderers, which is in line with how the local press has long treated defectors as bad elements.
Brian Reynolds Myers
The answer to hate words is not speech codes but strong protest and educational efforts when we hear them. Don't ban bigoted language, but let those who use it know what to expect-severe public criticism, spontaneous demonstrations and why. This may be the liberal American Civil Liberties Union position; so be it, for history shows that limits on one person's freedom of speech make it a non-freedom for others. In failing to take this stand, progressives and leftists also aid the PC-baiters by giving them the moral high ground of being "anti-censorship."
Elizabeth Martinez
As a guide to engineering ethics, I should like to commend to you a liberal adaptation of the injunction contained in the oath of Hippocrates that the professional man do nothing that will harm his client. Since engineering is a profession which affects the material basis of everyone's life, there is almost always an unconsulted third party involved in any contact between the engineer and those who employ him - and that is the country, the people as a whole. These, too, are the engineer's clients, albeit involuntarily. Engineering ethics ought therefore to safeguard their interests most carefully. Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court” and keep the general interest always in mind.
Hyman G. Rickover
I said, now that I'm collaborating with the rightists, my reputation isn't good. I said, in your [the Americans'] country there are two parties and it's been said that the Democrats are more enlightened. As for the Republicans, they lean more to the right. I said there is nothing great about the Democrats. I neither admire nor am interested in them. I said, when you [Nixon] were running for President, I gave you my vote. You are still not aware of that. [...] This time round, we also gave you our vote [Tanaka]. It's exactly like you said. If the main player, which is the Liberal Democratic Party [of Japan], doesn't come here, how can we resolve the issue? [...] I said, that communist party of yours in Japan, I'm not interested in them.
Mao Zedong
What I mean by "liberal"...is a moral rectitude and intellectual certainty claimed by a small but powerful sect of publicists and politicians on behalf of an arbitrary collection of policies, some of which are sensible and some bogus, but which in bulk are made offensive by the way in which they are presented.
Maurice Cowling
[W]hat Mrs Thatcher seems to have sensed-is that that part of the liberal intelligentsia which grew up in the shadow of Hitler, Spain and Unemployment is deeply alienated from the Labour party. It has never liked trades unions even though, in the form of the 'ragged-trouser generation' (as Mr Stuart Hampshire calls it), it was willing, when young, to profess sympathy for the working classes whom it idolized in ignorance and at a distance and, quite wrongly, regarded as its natural ally in the fight against illiberal, reactionary, capitalistic Conservatism.
Maurice Cowling
So far as the Labour party is concerned, The Open Society is almost entirely irrelevant. The Labour party from the Webbs to Attlee, though it believed in state-power as the antidote to inequality and competition and misunderstood Stalin's Russia, was neither intellectually Stalinist nor intellectually totalitarian. Its defects were then and are now more domestic and homely – the minority-mindedness and nonconformist conscience which Keynes discerned in Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, the conviction of moral impregnability which makes it intolerant, evasive and querulous when policy conflicts with principle or goodwill stubs its toe on interests, and the sympathy for fads and crankcauses which it inherited from the Liberal party and continues to display in the imprisonment of General Pinochet, the campaign against fox hunting and the nonsense involved in Mr Cook's "ethical foreign policy".
Maurice Cowling
