Conservative Mindset Quotes

I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later) and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.28

Conservatives, she explained, were “crazy” and worse than “alien terrorists.” In March 2014, a friend wrote to complain about Texas Republicans. Lerner responded, “Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best. He should’[v]e let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.” Around

The modern world is a killjoy, in short. But the ancient Greeks were quite different, and different also from the over-serious stuffy men with English accents who play them in period dramas. What they admired was a carelessness and freedom from constraint that would shock us, and that upsets especially the dour leftist and the conservative role-player.

…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.

This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

Let’s have a closer look at Sue. Appearance-wise, Jerry’s mother was a dark dream with full lips and almond eyes; fashion-wise, she spared no expense but looked as conservative as all the rest; in terms of morals she was entirely conventional; in personality a flirt; in outlook a skeptic; in disposition a bleak and dire depressive; in political mind-set more progressive than most; in matters of sex, boldly forward, then discreetly withholding; she was mercurial at parties and dances (a charmer one night, a mute the next); in love a total slave, but as an object of a man’s desire, she was a merciless and cunning manipulator. If her kindness was subject to moods, she had her table manners down cold, and her telephone etiquette was impeccable.

Indeed, this delayed disclosure of the crucial personal detail dents Mr. Modi’s credibility as a prime ministerial candidate. With the socially conservative RSS driving the BJP’s campaign, there is the apprehension of a resurgence of a patriarchal mindset reflecting restrictive approaches to the issue of further empowerment of women.

The political establishment was caught off guard because words like “despair,” “anger,” and “anxiety” refer to emotions, and the establishment mind-set sees emotions as “soft” rather than “hard” political factors. Its worldview is transactional rather than relational, treating the exchange of money far more seriously than the exchange of love. But a healthy political order does not leave our deep humanity out of the equation; it values the workings of the heart as well as the workings of the economy. Government is here to serve its people, and people are not just job numbers or cogs in a corporate machine. We are living, breathing, divinely created beings on this earth for a high and mighty purpose. No politics, and no political establishment, that fails to see us that way or treat us that way is worthy. We don’t just need a progressive politics or a conservative politics; we need a more deeply human politics. We need a politics of love. Love is the angel of our better nature, just as fear is the demon of the lower self. And it is love, not fear, that has made us great. When politics is used for loveless purposes, love and love alone can override it. It was love that abolished slavery, it was love that gave women suffrage, it was love that established civil rights, and it is love that we need now.

The fundamentalist mindset feels stifling to the individual and cruel in its implications for others. A believer who becomes more open-minded toward diversity of lifestyle can become unwilling to toe the party line in condemning others. In the past slavery was approved, and bigoted attitudes are still common in conservative churches. At present, the rhetoric about “family values” is strangely intolerant of varieties of family structure and women’s issues. The most glaring condemnation is of gays and lesbians, which can result in violent assaults, not Christian love.

The notion that unemployment benefits shouldn’t be provided, as they might foster a dependency mindset, reflects a conservative paranoia.

Indian economy can withstand the world financial crisis better. This is due to: The liberalization process in India has checks and balances consistent with the unique social requirements of the country. The Indian banking system has always been conservative, which has prevented a crisis similar to that in the US and in Europe. The Indian psyche is generally savings-oriented and living within one’s means is a part of the Indian mindset. The 400-million-strong middle class, with its purchasing power, is providing economic stability to the nation.

Friant Dam. When we built Friant Dam, we explicitly understood that we were condemning salmon in the San Joaquin River.7 This extractive mindset that pays no mind to replenishment or conservation, that says the workings of the natural world are for our own one-time use, is an anachronism of unwise, greedy, and ultimately dangerous thinking. In this case, a lawsuit led to the interagency project to restore salmon to the San Joaquin.

If you really observe “suburbia,” it was created from fear or for lack of a better word, the conservative mindset terrified of anything original. Especially terrified of the individual. Thousands of years ago they called it Babylon.