Moderates Quotes

Necessity moderates more troubles than reason. ~ Luc De Clapiers

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success. ~ David Benioff

As a general rule, moderate levels of arousal facilitate deployment of skills, whereas high arousal disrupts it. This is especially true of complex activities requiring intricate organization of behavior ~ Albert Bandura

In the name of Our Lord, Monsieur, do all you can to regain your health and take good care of it so that you can serve God and the poor for a longer time. This moderate care does not preclude the obligation we have of generously risking our lives when the salvation of our neighbor is concerned. ~ Vincent De Paul

I should do something about the cigarettes; I quite accept that it's bad for your health, but you know a moderate tipple is positively beneficial and, at certain times, absolutely essential. ~ Charles Kennedy

Sometimes the results of a first free election will find the moderates so poorly organized that extreme groups can eke out a victory, as Hamas did when it gained a 44-to-41 percent margin in the Palestinian election of 2006. ~ Elliott Abrams

Moderates shouldn't be nervous about Newt because he has a vision, he's laid it forward. He's fundamentally leading us in the way that middle class Americans want to go. ~ Pete Du Pont

Prudence and love cannot be mixed; you can end love, but never moderate it. ~ Seneca The Younger

The struggle you see in the Republican Party today is the country club Republican versus the bowling alley Republican. Colin Powell brings us back to the country club image. He's an insider. He's a moderate. ~ Pete Du Pont

Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts. ~ Ken Follett

I consider myself a moderate Republican. I have very, very moderate social views, and I'm pretty strong on, on defense matters. ~ Colin Powell

One of the things about leadership is that you've got to show up. And if you want to be president of the United States you've got to make a case to the American people that Barack Obama needs to be dismissed from his position. ~ Tim Pawlenty

As a former Republican, I represent a group of Americans who all too often have no one to speak for them. This group doesn't necessarily have a name. We've been called 'moderates,' but that term can be misleading. ~ Lincoln Chafee

A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study. ~ Mary Shelley

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems. ~ Renata Adler

You're shooting yourself in the foot if you isolate or disempower the moderates. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

No man, however benevolent, liberal, and wise, can use a large fortune so that it will do half as much good in the world as it would if it were divided into moderate sums and in the hands of workmen who had earned it by industry and frugality. The piling up of estates often does great and conspicuous good ... But no man does with accumulated wealth so much good as the same amount would do in many hands. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. ~ Sam Harris

It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution. ~ Daniel Pipes

There are moderates in Israel. There are moderates in Iran, there are moderates in the Republican Party, moderates in the Democratic Party. What we need to do is we need link all of these moderates together and to figure out a way by which this particular coalition can speak to important issues to marginalize the voice of the extremists. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf

What did John Ashcroft say about moderates, he said, quote, there are two things you find in the middle of the road, a moderate and a dead skunk and I don't want to be either, ~ John Ashcroft

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum. ~ Mark McKinnon

There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

It's important that we work very closely with moderate Muslim forces locally, nationally and internationally. ~ Gijs De Vries

Individuals possessing moderate-sized brains easily find their proper sphere, and enjoy in it scope for all their energy. In ordinary circumstances they distinguish themselves, but they sink when difficulties accumulate around them. Persons with large brains, on the other hand, do not readily attain their appropriate place; common occurrences do not rouse or call them forth. ~ George Combe

Jeb Bush was supposed to be the establishment candidate, but he didn't catch on. And the extraordinary thing about this Republican primary is that the establishment, moderate wing of the party has sidelined itself. They're not coalescing around one candidate as they have in the past. ~ Mara Liasson

The more aggressive our ideologies become, the more aggressive our discourse whether it's in the United States, from Washington D.C., or whether it's from Tehran, or from some underground Al-Qaeda cell. The more aggressive that discourse is, the more people of moderate persuasion have to organize and speak a voice of compassion. That means to feel with the other. ~ Karen Armstrong

The reason we're governing right now is because we defeated moderate Republicans with moderate Democrats. And people need to be patient about that and realize that compromise is not evil. ~ Barack Obama

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Growing up, I lived a moderate lifestyle with my family. ~ Liam Hemsworth

People of all political persuasions - conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike - need to dedicate themselves once again to preserving the moral foundation of our society. ~ Tipper Gore

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good ... If we will take the good we find, ... we shall have heaping measures ... ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The religious opponents of Christian conservatives are presented as moderates. ~ Ronald H. Nash

these ideological cliques form in a government--or any other organization. Subordinates are always chosen for their agreement with the views of their superiors, and the extremists always get to the top and shove the moderates under or out. ~ H. Beam Piper

Let's cooperate and challenge the administration to cooperate with us because within the administration there are also moderates and people who are not fully comfortable with the tendencies that have prevailed in recent times. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

The conservative candidate who ignores moderates is as misguided as the moderate candidate who ignores conservatives. ~ Mike Lee

If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day - doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents - it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of "independents" and "moderates" may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort i ~ William E. Connolly

There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it. ~ Clint Eastwood

And I said couldn't we be more moderate? And he said why? And I said because I care about the team. And he said, 'No Jony, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you, because I thought you really held the work up as the most important and not how you are perceived by people.' People misunderstand Steve because he was so focused. ~ Jonathan Ive

Women of no beauty may yet be flattered to believe they possess some; others of a moderate share that they have a great deal; but those of elegance and charm generally know the perfection of their external graces so well, that they seem to covet that flattery most which heightens the opinion of their wit and judgment. ~ Norm MacDonald

I have long said there are three distinct groups under the GOP's tent: theological warriors, who want to impose their social views on the rest of society; Tea Party zealots, who say with a straight face that they want the government to get out of their Medicare; and remnants of the pro-business moderates. ~ Eliot Spitzer

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us. ~ Jimmy Carter

I hear all the time that peace activists are naive, that it is impossible to talk to extremists--people who have no regard for the lives of innocents... But in my experience in conflict zones the world over, there are always people to talk to. From members of Hamas in Gaza to Baathists under Saddam's Iraq to the Taliban in Afganistan to government officials in Iran, it is a major blunder to label all our perceived enemies as extremists incapable of rational conversation. People join militant groups for many reasons--religious, family, social pressure, revenge for some wrong they experienced, political ideology, poverty. With such diversity of motives, the are always some people who can be enticed to talk about peace. Our goal should be to seek them out, to strengthen the moderates. Unfortunately, our actions have only served to embolden the extremists. ~ Medea Benjamin

Be merciful, moderate, and modest. ~ Laozi

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a
moderate extent, the money is taken away. ~ Thomas Sowell

My father built low- and moderate-income housing in Queens and Brooklyn. I learned a lot from him. But I went in a different direction. I built Trump Tower in Manhattan, the most luxurious building in the world. It's not going to be easy for my son, but maybe it shouldn't be easy. Life is, after all, a test. ~ Donald Trump

US policy of recruiting Syrian "moderates" to fight both ISIS and Assad, Biden said that in Syria the US had found "that there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers." Seldom have the real forces at work in creating ISIS and the present crisis in Iraq and Syria been so accurately described. ~ Patrick Cockburn

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Let it please thee to keep in order a moderate-sized farm, that so thy garners may be full of fruits in their season. ~ Hesiod

In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity. ~ Margaret Atwood

There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore. ~ Bill Maher

One of the great things about America is we should not judge until we know the facts. ~ Stanley A. McChrystal

Can you imagine if you had a pair of shoes that you could only walk in? That could be kind of limiting under certain circumstances. 'Everybody get outta here! There's a swarm of bees coming!' What? Oh great, I got my walking shoes on today. I guess I better stroll the hell out of here at a moderate pace. ~ Arj Barker

In success be moderate. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Many people around the President have sizeable egos before entering government, some with good reason. Their new positions will do little to moderate their egos. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed ~ Alan Greenspan

Most people perceive moderates as timid middle-of-the-roaders who can't take a stand. ~ Rick Bayan

What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean? ~ Antonin Scalia

Our mind is like a fog; even a moderate wind disperses it easily. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The Republican Party is a much bigger tent than people give it credit for. We have a lot of what I guess you all call moderate Republicans. ~ Rudy Giuliani

We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics. ~ Orson Scott Card

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The battleground has been moderates of all faith traditions in all the countries of the world against the radicals of all faith traditions in all parts of the world. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf

My view on Democrats is that they're fascists disguised as liberals, or liberal moderates. You're not allowed to say anything they don't agree with. You're not allowed to do anything. ~ Glenn Danzig

If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. ~ Joshua Reynolds

It will be well to advert to the proportion between the objects that will require a federal provision in respect to revenue; and those which will require a state provision. We shall discover that the former are altogether unlimited; and that the latter are circumscribed within very moderate bounds. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos.

This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions. ~ Bayard Rustin

The nomination of Richard Nixon cemented the ascendance of a conservative over a moderate ideology within the Republican Party, a dominance that has only grown more pronounced over the years as the party has continued its move to the right and moderates have dwindled in numbers and influence. I sometimes think that I didn't leave the Republican Party as much as it left me. I ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they are pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate. ~ Jonathan Haidt

So our own actions sometimes have undermined our safety, in our efforts to fight terrorism. The only way this can work is if we are aligned with liberals, with moderate Muslim forces. But if our war on terrorism is seen - as it is seen by many Muslims - as a war on Islam itself, it's very hard for us to have Muslim alliances, because America and the West have become so toxic. ~ Yaroslav Trofimov

The Bible says we're to be moderate in all things. It's good to help others but not at the expense of your own family. ~ Lori Copeland

Let all your views in life be directed to a solid, however moderate, independence; without it no man can be happy, nor even honest. ~ Junius

Dewey could only shake his head in wonder at those who insisted on ideological purity and who wanted to purge the party of moderates and liberals. If the Republican Party were only a party of conservatives, Dewey warned, and truly became the party of reaction that yearned to return the nation to "the miscalled 'good old days' of the nineteenth century . . . you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country. ~ Scott Farris

I write about what life was like for typical young women of the sixties - not the type that made headlines, the Hanoi Janes or Angela Davises, but moderates who nonetheless got swept up by history's tides during that turbulent time. All that turmoil lends itself to drama, intrigue, and murder. ~ Kay Kendall

The immediate present belongs to the extremists, but the future belongs to the moderates. ~ Helen Suzman

Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. ~ Sam Harris

I don't say 'Tis impossible for an impudent man not to rise in the world, but a moderate merit with a large share of impudence is more probable to be advanced than the greatest qualifications without it. ~ Mary Wortley Montagu

I want to be clear that when I used terms such as "pretense" and "intellectual dishonesty" when we first met, I wasn't casting judgment on you personally. Simply living with the moderate's dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I'm not such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interests of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it's an excruciating problem for Muslims. ~ Sam Harris

We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions. ~ C. G. Jung

O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy, In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess! ~ William Shakespeare

Don't get politics mixed up in this. It's all about money and it makes no difference if the Social Democrats or the moderates appoint the ministers ~ Stieg Larsson

Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. ~ Sam Harris

Even moderates, they can see in Trump the potential to have logjams broken and things finally get done. This makes some conservatives and some liberals furious, nervous, and me nervous a little bit, because I'm a pretty pure conservative. So that's a potential of his leadership. ~ Jeff Sessions

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs. ~ Carroll Quigley

Obama and the Democrats are not focused on the moderates. They're focused on getting their base out, and they're trying to expand that base by forming sympathetic, empathetic alliances with the downtrodden, and there are a lot of downtrodden because Obama has made them that way via his policies. ~ Rush Limbaugh

You can end love more easily than you can moderate it. ~ Seneca The Elder

It's important to reach out to moderate Arab nations, like Jordan and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. ~ George W. Bush

Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.5 But ~ Charles J. Chaput

Persons with comparatively moderate powers will accomplish much, if they apply themselves wholly and indefatigably to one thing at a time. ~ Samuel Smiles

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure. ~ Timothy Noah

I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment. ~ John Stuart Mill

Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the moderates of their own religions. ~ Mark Thomas

There are moderates in Syria who we should be supporting. ~ John Kasich

There is nothing which continues longer than a moderate fortune; nothing of which one sees sooner the end than a large fortune. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

And it is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best. ~ Thucydides

Being moderate with oneself and generous with others; this is what is meant by having a just relationship with money, by being free as far as money is concerned. ~ Natalia Ginzburg

Catholics are every bit as diverse as any other sort of voters out there, with conservative Democrats and moderates. ~ Bob Casey, Jr.

One thing that I feel very, very strongly is that we talk about Islamic countries, Islamic people, Islamic leaders, as either moderates or extremists. It's almost like there are only two categories of Muslims. And actually, that doesn't show respect. It shows lack of understanding of the diversity of Muslim thought. ~ David Miliband

Uganda can greatly benefit from American evangelicals if they separate the Scott Lively extremists from the Rick Warren-type of moderate evangelicals. ~ Roger Ross Williams