liberal quotes

There is nothing new inThird World governments seeking to justifyand perpetuate authoritarian rule by denouncing liberal democratic principles as alien.

-Aung San Suu Kyi
  Freedom From Fear,'In Quest of Democracy'.

A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.

-Jones
  'Tokenism', in Kulchur, spring issue.

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
  The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

The most fundamental value of a liberal education isthat it makes life more interesting.

- Kingman,Jr Brewster
Recalled on his death in the NewYork Times, 9 Nov1988.

If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.

-Terry Eagleton
  In the London Review of Books, 2 Dec.

I often think it's comical How Nature always does contrive That every boyand every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  Private Willis's song, Iolanthe, act 2.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

- Calvin Marshall Trillin
  The Liberal Imagination,'Princess Casamassima'.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

-Tom (Thomas Kennerley) Wolfe
  The Bonfire of theVanities, ch.24.