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d507ea2
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In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.
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anxiety
conservatism
delusion
uncertainty
psychology
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Alan Moore |
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5782906
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-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
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war
right-wingers
conservatives
conservatism
military
authority
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Joseph Heller |
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ad0547a
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There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.
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violence
politics
keynesianism
welfare-states
conservatism
united-states
politics-of-the-united-states
economics
law
intellectuals
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Noam Chomsky |
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1d9d8ff
|
"When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.
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morality
politics
class-warfare
conservatism
republican-party-united-states
united-states
economics
liberalism
society
mathematics
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Robert B. Reich |
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276b81e
|
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
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radicalism
conservatism
united-states
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Christopher Hitchens |
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9184fc3
|
The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'--the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has--from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
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india
influence
humanism
politics
contradiction
charles-lindbergh
collectivism
edmund-burke
israel-shahak
radicalism
spinozism
ireland
gore-vidal
partisanship
conservatism
french-revolution
free-thought
united-states
individualism
thomas-paine
revolution
israel
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Christopher Hitchens |
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4dc4a38
|
Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.
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sex
literature
illusion
television
cable-television
cable-television-in-the-us
conservatism-in-the-us
gore-vidal
william-f-buckley
conservatism
united-states
perception
guilt
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Christopher Hitchens |
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b46538c
|
Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.
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conservatism
status-quo
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Robert A. Caro |
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0f65943
|
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.
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politics
truth
falsehood
protecting
conservatism
tradition
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Roger Scruton |
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279ceb2
|
There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism
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politics
conservatism
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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56314e6
|
"Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow. "It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you."
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poverty
parochialism
conservatism
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Alice Munro |
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cb57395
|
The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.
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conservatism
liberal
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Roger Scruton |