I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
—John Maynard Keynes
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
—Mark Twain
The culture has moved to the point where I find myself in the far left without having gone there. I still feel like I'm putting up my father's old Indiana farmer's values. I think I'm a conservative. I don't think these guys that call themselves "conservatives" really are; these guys are high rollers and plungers and bet-the-farm-on-slender-odds guys; they ain't conservatives. I think a conservative is somebody who cares about conserving the planet and the air and the water and the sky and the sun. It is something mean to say that mankind has fucked up the sunshine.
—Stephen Gaskin
Conservatives have historically seen people falling through the cracks in society and said, That's the way things work, survival of the fittest. Liberals see people falling through the cracks and say, We've got to do something about those people falling through the cracks, so we need a strong government that can provide programs and assist those people. Populists say there shouldn't be any cracks; let's fix them.
—Jim Hightower
A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.
—Woodrow Wilson
To explain why we become attached to our birthplaces, we pretend that we are trees and speak of "roots." Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
—Salman Rushdie
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
—Robert Anton Wilson