Progressivism Quotes

“There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining "punishment" and "being supposed to punish" hurts it, arouses fear in it. "Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?
Punishing itself is terrible." With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, New Nationalism Speech by Teddy Roosevelt

“These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

“The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world’s resources. How do men and women, boys and girls, live lives of compassion, justice and love? And I think that’s the visionary challenge for feminism and all other progressive movements for social change.”
― bell hooks

“Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.”
― Bill Moyers

“Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
― Eric Hoffer

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked — Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.”
― Eric Hoffer

“Oligarchies, throughout past history, have always thought more of their own advantage than of that of the rest of the community. It would be foolish to be morally indignant with them on this account; human nature, in the main and in the mass, is egoistic, and in most circumstances a fair dose of egoism is necessary for survival. It was revolt against the selfishness of past political oligarchies that produced the Liberal movement in favour of democracy, and it was revolt against economic oligarchies that produced Socialism. But although everybody who was in any degree progressive recognised the evils of oligarchy throughout the past history of mankind, many progressives were taken in by an argument for a new kind of oligarchy. ‘We, the progressives’ — so runs the argument — ‘are the wise and good; we know what reforms the world needs; if we have power, we shall create a paradise.’ And so, narcissistically hypnotised by contemplation of their own wisdom and goodness, they proceeded to create a new tyranny, more drastic than any previously known.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society

“Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.”
― Richard Just, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

“Al Qaeda's central political objective is the creation of an Islamic republic, not the progressive realignment of American foreign policy.”
― Simon Cottee

“Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left.”
― Sean Hannity, Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama's Radical Agenda

“The popular claim that “real socialism has never been tried” implies that all the Hispanic, Asian, Slavic, and African cultures that did attempted it were not up to the task. It is a form of racial slur that exposes the ethnocentric elitism at the core of Western collectivists.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Liberation has enslaved them!”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Adjustment Day

“Ever since moral relativism ushered in 'personal truths' the validity of 'science' has become subjective.”
― Frank Salvato

“Privilege is simply the target the progressive left paints on the back of those whose power they want.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“What can be spoken of soon comes to be condoned.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“Humans can engineer Architecture.
Architecture cannot engineer humans.”
― A.E. Samaan

“With starry eyes we forget what is literally the oldest trick in The Book: that the very first 'liberal' was one of deception - a snake in the Garden - and he corrupted paradise.”
― Criss Jami

“Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development, - to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short, - to try to do good with people rather than to them, - this is my religion on its human side”
― Randolph Bourne, Youth and life

“You don't want respect! You want representation!
...Asking for respect will never get you any respect at all.
But seeking and demanding representation will give you self-respect and the true respect you deserve.
Is this just a political statement, you tell me is not everything political?”
― Anonymous @AnonymousLyWise

“In this blind rage, they throw their fists at Christianity and hit Common Sense, then Common Sense enters the fight.”
― Criss Jami

“Fowler's philosophy [of phrenology] is all about the possibility and real hope of change. Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant; if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one's life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways and their selves... Bad actions became the correctable result of improper development, rather than machinations of some cloven-footed prat with a fiery pitchfork. What Fowler holds out is nothung less than the promise of redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last, Fowler tears aside his scientific raiments, and reveals what he has been all along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? "[Let us] redouble our efforts for... that high and holy destiny hereafter as such by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION!" Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivisim.”
― Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

“Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense.

Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer.

Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society