Progressives Quotes

To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault. ~ Robert Conquest

Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me
indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm
and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt. ~ Alexandre Dumas

We are particularly frustrated that so much of our politics today consists of lines first written during the clashes, domestic and foreign, of the 1960s. This "Groundhog Day" approach to replaying the culture war's tropes is perhaps nowhere in greater evidence than in how Americans talk about patriotism. Patriotism, as an idea, has been co-opted over the course of a generation by right-wingers who use the flag not as a symbol of transcendent national unity, but as a sectarian cudgel against the hippies, Francophiles, free-lovers and tree-huggers who constitute their caricature of the American left. The American left, for its part, has been so beaten down by this star-spangled caricature that it has largely ceded the very notion of patriotism to the right. As a result, the first reaction of far too many progressives to any talk of patriotism is automatic, allergic recoil. Needless to say, this reaction simply tightens the screws of the right's imprisoning caricature. ~ Eric Liu

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral. ~ Freya Stark

Bernie Sanders has done a great job of, social media black kids know about him. Young black people progressives know about him. Through barbershops and barbershop tour that we have been on, we hit three barbershops a day. People know about him. ~ Killer Mike

Progressives must not portray all abortions as tragedies ... Senator Hillary Clinton, in a 2005 speech commendable for setting forth a prochoice, pro-prevention, pro-family agenda, took the aspiration a step in the wrong direction when she called for policy changes so that abortion 'does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances. ~ Dawn Johnsen

Progressives, in a way, are the new conservatives. We want to conserve what we fought to build. ~ Al Franken

These assumptions lead progressives into other traps: assuming that hard facts will persuade voters, that voters are "rational" and vote in their self-interest and on the issues, and that negating a frame is an effective way to argue against it. 5. ~ George Lakoff

I make it a policy every election to only debate once, Democrats and Progressives. And I will say that the way that you have acted, very candidly, has been dishonorable in this entire campaign. ~ Matt Shea

I'm not ready to give you a clear answer on whether electoral politics holds any particular hope for progressives. It would mean that nothing I did ever mattered. ~ Tom Hayden

Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in their indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its "bourgeois" pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the "progressives" blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly outdated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Ending feudalism, ending slavery, enacting labor laws, winning universal suffrage, ending Jim Crow laws, overcoming much of the mindset and practice of patriarchy as it was entrenched in the '50s and '60s, bringing gay rights and liberation into the light of social policy and practice. Putting ecology on the political map. The left has a long lineage. ~ Michael Albert

Liberals really, really, really like to talk about how open-minded they are - a lot. And yet, today, there are few doing more to suppress the individual's freedom to act, think, say, and write what they want in the United States than so-called progressives. ~ Eric Bolling

Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. ~ Paul Hawken

Progressives should argue progressivism. We need to get out of issue silos that isolate arguments and keep us from the values and principles that define an overall progressive vision. 2. ~ George Lakoff

Secular progressive thought also denies free will, viewing all our behavior as ultimately attributable to genes and environment. Between blaming society and denying free will, progressives are more interested in understanding violent criminals than in punishing them. That explains why in Norway, for example, the maximum sentence for murder is 21 years in prison, and few Norwegian murderers spend more than 14 years behind bars. ~ Dennis Prager

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing. ~ Thomas Sowell

It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many "red state" voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works. ~ George Lakoff

It is fair to say, Bernie Sanders, that in your definition, as you being the self-proclaimed gatekeeper for progressivism, I don't know anyone else who fits that definition, but I know a lot of really hard fighting progressives in the Democratic party who have stood up time, and time again against special interests, against the powerful on behalf of those who are left behind and left out. ~ Hillary Clinton

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

The "progressives" who today masquerade as "liberals" may rant against "fascism"; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism. Nothing could have been more helpful to the success of the National-Socialist (Nazi) movement than the methods used by the "progressives," denouncing Nazism as a party serving the interests of "capital." The German workers knew this tactic too well to be deceived by it again. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

At what point do [progressives] take off our partisan blinders and start wondering whether a very powerful faction of Democrats actually continues to SUPPORT President Bush and the War in Iraq? ~ David Sirota

There is a tradition that jumping off a precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. And the tradition is thereby mocked - to the peril of us all. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It is a challenge that progressives face throughout the country. We lose when we are divided. We win when we are united. At ~ Bernie Sanders

I think, with Obama and the progressives, you've seen a massive expansion of big government, and it's all based on a moral premise. The moral premise is that wealth is theft. And I don't just mean the wealth of America, I mean, your wealth, my wealth. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy," he wrote. "There can be neither political nor industrial democracy unless people are reasonably well-to-do, and also reasonably able to achieve the difficult task of self-mastery."17 The progressives wanted mastery over the ~ Ganesh Sitaraman

And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive. ~ Jonah Goldberg

The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if by right - until conservatives stole it from them - they weaken progressivism. ~ Rick Perlstein

When women vote, Progressives can win. When women organize and bring some common sense to the conversation, it becomes more authentic. ~ Christine Pelosi

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill. ~ Thomas Sowell

Progressives make money and spend money on businesses that meet needs instead of kill people! The future is in meeting needs - unto the bourgeois business of cleaning the drapes! - not spewing death and destruction with kickbacks. ~ Mimi Kennedy

Mr. Obama plans to boost federal spending 25 percent while nearly tripling the national debt over 10 years. Americans know that this kind of spending will have economic consequences, including new taxes being imposed by the new progressives. ~ Karl Rove

The most important thing will be building a bench of powerhouse progressives in elected office and in the next administration. [Bernie] Sanders has an enormous spotlight that he can shine on champions that are following the Sanders path of really building from the left. ~ Ben Wikler

Today, we're no longer just 'Muslim'. We're 'progressives', 'Islamists', 'traditionalists', 'salafis', 'indigenous', and 'immigrants'. And each group has become so alienated from the other, that we've almost forgotten that we share a common creed. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for progressives to be racists. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Thanks to Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we are now living under a system where the president is forced to step in to stop a regulatory agency from promulgating regulations that Congress refused to enact. ~ Andrew P. Napolitano

Anthony Howard, then editor of the left-wing New Statesman, once pointed out that if Huey Long had only used left-wing phraseology he would have enjoyed wide support from the New York and London intelligentsia. ~ Robert Conquest

Just as altruism tells an individual that however much he is sacrificing, his duty is to sacrifice more, the Progressives concluded that however much Americans were giving, morality required them to give more. ~ Yaron Brook

Progressives start small. They introduce 'commonsense' regulations and restrictions that will supposedly save lives. Then, each time the public's attention is captured, they push further. ~ Glenn Beck

Progressives' don't just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too. ~ Kathy Shaidle

In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan - room and board included prepaid - and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods. ~ David Mamet

Christian socialism"). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call "state capitalism. ~ Jonah Goldberg

The left regards murderers, rapists, thieves and other violent criminals more as victims than as contemptible. Violent criminals do what they do because of poverty, racism and inequality, progressives argue. ~ Dennis Prager

But I think it's very key that there's a plan for Haiti. And we have to begin to - as progressives and people who are concerned about Haiti and have been concerned about Haiti, we have to begin to build some sort of consensus, a movement around the Haiti that the Haitians envision. ~ Danny Glover

These self-styled liberals and progressives are honestly convinced that they are true democrats. But their notion of democracy is just the opposite of that of the nineteenth century. They confuse democracy with socialism. They not only do not see that socialism and democracy are incompatible but they believe that socialism alone means real democracy. Entangled in this error, they consider the Soviet system a variety of popular government. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions. ~ Joseph Epstein

Charting liberal hypocrisy is now old hat. From academia to the Sierra Club, elite progressives expect to live lives that are quite different from what they envision for the less sophisticated. No one believes that Elizabeth Warren would wish affirmative action to work for everyone in the way that she herself subverted it. Nor would we expect Warren not to be in the 1 percent that she so scolds - any more than we would assume that Al Gore would not leave a carbon footprint as large as those of thousands of the less environmentally sensitive put together. ~ Anonymous

Contrary to what we hear, the great American divide is not a clash between conservatives who advocate liberty versus progressives who oppose liberty. Rather, the two sides each affirm a certain type of liberty. One side, for example, cherishes economic liberty while the other champions liberty in the sexual and social domain. Nor is it a clash between patriots and anti-patriots. Both sides love America, but they love a different type of America. One side loves the America of Columbus and the Fourth of July, of innovation and work and the "animal spirit" of capitalism, of the Boy Scouts and parochial schools, of traditional families and flag-saluting veterans. The other side loves the America of tolerance and social entitlements, of income and wealth redistribution, of affirmative action and abortion, of feminism and gay marriage. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

We seemed to be heading toward a revolution that would not only see a battle between the haves and have-nots, but between the fundamentalists and the progressives - actually that war had already begun, and it did so long before September 11. ~ Michael Lister

When we fight wars, money is no object. When we choose peace, we ration every penny. ~ Joel Berg

Socialists and Progressives confuse compassion and compulsion. ~ A.E. Samaan

Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives, I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game. ~ Eric Liu

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie. ~ Joseph Schumpeter

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Ensconced, he (Roosevelt) lacked some of the neuroses of progressives-economic envy and race hatred especially.His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency. ~ Edmund Morris

And while it's nice of you to want to call us 'modern' or 'moderate,' we'll do without the redundancy. Islam is by definition moderate, so the more strictly we adhere to its fundamentals - the more moderate we'll be. And Islam is by nature timeless and universal, so if we're truly Islamic - we'll always be modern.
We're not 'Progressives'; we're not 'Conservatives'. We're not 'neo-Salafi'; we're not 'Islamists'. We're not 'Traditionalists'; we're not 'Wahabis'. We're not 'Immigrants' and we're not 'Indigenous'. Thanks, but we'll do without your prefix.
We're just Muslim. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

It's not only progressives who listen to progressive radio. ~ Stephanie Miller

We are all "conservatives" in some sense, because we want to "conserve" some things while changing others. We are all "liberals" because we all want to be "free" in some respects. We are all "progressives" because we want to progress towards something: the question is, towards what? So instead of asking someone, are you conservative or liberal, right-wing or left-wing, why don't I ask what you want to conserve, and what to change, and why? Then we might finally have an intelligent debate about politics. ~ Stratford Caldecott

I am not too happy with terms like "the left", to be honest. And I don't use it much ... .if by "the left" you mean people who are committed to peace and justice and freedom and so on, there can't be elements of the left opposed to workers' movement, at least under that definition. ~ Noam Chomsky

Has society really become quite thin-skinned, or is acting "offended" a new tactic that is being used to shut down legitimate political debate? Progressives are increasingly claiming to be offended whenever those on the right disagree with their left-wing positions. It doesn't matter what the issue is; the left will divert a legitimate political debate into an accusation that the right disagrees with them because they are full of hate towards them. ~ Rachel Alexander

I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more. ~ Dahlia Lithwick

Society's only real 'progressives' are the deviants and mutants. Look at evolution - fish who didn't deviate never became amphibians; frogs who didn't mutate never became reptiles; conformist snakes never became mammals , etc. Normal Humans will remain humans, and they'll be subjugated by the digital monsters of the next few millenia. ~ Jim Goad

I found it especially terrible that when it came to racial politics, many young progressives, across racial lines, were far more willing to train their hatred on Hillary Clinton, a white woman, than on Bernie Sanders, a white man. White women have absolutely been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons have always been the masterminds. Let us never forget that. ~ Brittney Cooper

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded. ~ George Lakoff

You'll notice that for many progressives, taking from the rich is not simply a necessity of budgeting but a moral imperative and a tool to institute fairness that capitalism supposedly hasn't. ~ David Harsanyi

One of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own "revolutionary" defiance. It's this psychic weakness that allows this segment of the population to be manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The advantage is that their willingness to take orders has allowed them to organize effectively (try getting one hundred progressives at a meeting focused on anything). The downside is, they see absolutely nothing weird in launching a revolution based upon the ravings of a guy who's basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. ~ Matt Taibbi

Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights. ~ Eric Liu

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. ~ Paul Krugman

Progressives have spent the better part of a hundred years pushing their agenda - and they've hijacked everything from our kindergartens to our colleges to do it. The more 'educated' we get, the dumber we become. And that has always been the goal. There's a reason that slave masters wanted to keep their slaves illiterate: they understood that true education makes makes people long for freedom and liberty. Today's slave masters are the professors and unions and bureaucrats in Washington who run our education system. ~ Glenn Beck

The progressives are right that there is no way Gates can spend $50 billion on himself. He can only eat three meals a day and wear one set of clothes at a time. Even his heirs can be provided for with a fraction of that amount. Gates actually knows this. He has vowed to give away most of his fortune to charity. Nor is he waiting for death to do this. He has already given away billions. He buys mosquito nets for people in poor countries so that they don't get malaria. He invests in medical research. He funds educational projects in America and abroad. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

Black progressives suffered major disillusionment with white progressives when our experiences of working with them revealed that they could want to be with us (even to be our sexual partners) without divesting of white supremacist thinking about blackness. We saw that they were often unable to let go the idea that whites are somehow better, smarter, more likely to be intellectuals, and even that they were kinder than black folks. ~ Bell Hooks

I believe the United States government is being
systematically taken over by a revolutionary network. They call themselves
Progressives, but we know they are really leftist radicals,
dedicated to the demise of the free-market capitalist system. They have
co-opted and bought off leaders of both the Republican and Democratic
parties, established a dominant role in all three branches of
government and thoroughly co-opted the mainstream media. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

We're the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The "population explosion" is a prop of the Western progressive's bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place. ~ Mark Steyn

If you're an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: "Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you," then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing. ~ Kalid Gilad

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types
the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Somewhere along the way we've lost our convictions, and it appears that in the losing we've altogether forgotten what convictions are. For convictions have been meticulously redefined as rights run amuck in the service of self, greed mongering goals touted as the call of destiny obediently obeyed, the desire to abide by tawdry trends so as not to be ousted by favored groups, and other such horribly debilitating vices. And despite this utterly absurd rewrite (which is in fact a careless editing incessantly pawned off as embracing the most riveting legitimacy imaginable), convictions are in fact the commitment to steadfastly adhere to sound principles and proven ethics that thoughtfully build the world around us as they reshape the ugly agendas within us. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

A smaller axis of progressives do have intuitive and sometimes explicit understandings that the times are-a-changin'. These strata are concentrated around progressive parties such as the Pirate Party (started in Sweden, but had the most success in Germany and lately in Iceland), the Greens, the Feminist Initiative (also Sweden) and The Alternative (a Danish party, by far the most insightful and progressive one, discussed in chapter 5) Such parties are indicative of new progressive strata of the population, representing the groups we can call the triple-H: hipsters, hackers and hippies. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

Progressive racism is dedicated to uplifting poor blacks to a certain point and then keeping them there. The proof is that poor blacks today are about as poorly off as they were a half-century ago, when the progressive schemes of black uplift went into place. Every other ethnic group in America has dramatically improved its life except this one. Blacks have delivered for progressives, but they haven't progressed very much themselves. This, I suggest, is by design. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

The gay marriage thing to me, I don't understand why it's so important for the secular progressives in this country, the people who want to change America fundamentally and every way, why this is the lead issue. The L.A. Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe. These people are going, 'Oh, my God, what are you doing? How can you not see the civil rights aspect of this?' ~ Bill O'Reilly

Instead, progressives should speak in terms of the common concerns of voters - for instance, how a policy will let you send your daughter to college, or how it will let you launch your own business. 12. ~ George Lakoff

Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries. ~ Michael Ignatieff

They [progressives] are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

Progressives should recognize common morality with religion. ~ Barack Obama

By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy. ~ Thomas Sowell

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the '70s and '80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the '60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded. ~ Noam Chomsky

Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives, originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious fundamentalism. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Thank you for the opportunity for the Democratic Party and progressives to reclaim the votes of the sane citizens of these United States. ~ Jennifer Granholm

I don't believe in lobbying only progressives and liberal members of Congress. I don't believe in doing interviews only with those who share my views. I want to reach a wider audience. ~ Bianca Jagger

The very opposition between "conservative" and "progressive" politics can be conceived of in the terms of Darwinism: ultimately, conservatives defend the right of those with might (their very success proves that they won in the struggle for survival), while progressives advocate the protection of endangered human species, i.e., of those losing the struggle for survival. ~ Anonymous

For too long, our controversies seem to boil down to conservatives and liberals (or, if you prefer, traditionalists and progressives) talking past each other for the benefit of stirring up their loyalists, as partisans do in the primary campaigns of electoral politics. The rest of us are expected to line up with our team just as soon as they show their colors. ~ Ken Wilson

There are always two kinds of people in every country: Progressives and reactionaries; wise people and ignorant; democrats and fascists; libertarians and oppressive. All struggles happen between these two parties. If you are in the first group, your greatest reward will be dignity and victory! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications. ~ John Podhoretz

America is a post-Christian nation only in the sense that we have built a tenement on the foundation of a palace. ~ Ron Brackin

Many people ... prefer to describe themselves as progressives rather than liberals. To some extent that's a response to the decades-long propaganda campaign conducted by movement conservatives, which has been quite successful in making Americans disdain the word liberal but much less successful in reducing support for liberal policies. ~ Paul Krugman

In the US, most progressives start to see the differences between internationalism and economic globalization. ~ David Korten

Progressivism is a spectrum; it's not an ideology following one leader saying one thing. It's many people who have very wildly diverging opinions about many things. But, as progressives, if we could commit to a general frame of reference that we are about improving the quality of life for a lot more people, we're about helping working and middle-class people, and we're about taking care of poor people, we could really make some inroads in political power in this country. But, if we choose to be purists, if we choose to be arguing for a consensus we will never reach, for agreement on every point, it's never going to happen. ~ Urvashi Vaid

AN IMPERIALIST POWER THAT ACTS ON ITS OWN REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS. 18–29 30–49 50–64 65+ Improper/Somewhat improper 86% 73 69 67 Somewhat proper/Proper 3 13 20 17 No other group we studied - not Democrats generally, not self-described progressives or libertarians, not readers of The New York Times - had a greater spread between the two extremes. ~ John Zogby