Liberalism - christiansquoting.org.uk

Liberalism is a disease masquerading as its own cure.

If I had to choose between putting a saloon or a liberal church on a corner, I'd choose the saloon every time. People who drink up the pay check in the saloon are less likely to become Pharisees, thinking that they don't need the Great Physician, than those who weekly swill the soporific doctrine of man's goodness. Jay Adams

In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. --SPIRO AGNEW, Speech, San Diego, 11 Sept 1970.

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth. Jacques Barzun

What all liberals have in common is a touching certainty that they are right. Liberalism is a missionary faith, and proselytising zeal is not normally conducive to sceptical inquiry. Whatever the core values of liberalism, they can surely conflict with one another - and with other goods such as social cohesion. Yet it rarely occurs to liberals to ask themselves whether their values - however vaguely or inconsistently defined - are viable in the long term. - John Gray http://www.newstatesman.com/books.php3?URN=300000090978

A hallmark of modern liberal theology is that the search for truth is more important than the truth itself. Searching for truth is an existential delight, and for a liberal, it save you from having to take a firm position on anything. -- Steven F. Hayward, _The Real Jimmy Carter_, 2004

Liberals of all faiths are often in agreement becuse they don't believe in the same things - Rabbi Jacobs, formerly of Ealing Orthodox Synagogue

Post-1960s liberalism has lost its communal sensibility and now talks almost exclusively of autonomy and rights, not obligation or moral accountability. ...it has aggressively labored to devalue society by trying to banish moral and religious discourse from the public arena. Even the famous liberal belief in openness, tolerance and free speech now looks like a discarded belief. Witness all the disinvited speakers, stolen newspapers and current not-very-liberal efforts to silence Dr. Laura Schlessinger and derecognize campus Christian groups.--John Leo, 2000

O Lord, forasmuch as without thee, we are not able to doubt thee,
Grant us by thy grace that we may teach the human race
We know nothing whatever about thee.
A Liberal's Collect, 1920's

It is my belief, as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible, not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general. Religion, if it is to retain any genuine significance, can never be reduced to a series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony. It is, on the contrary, a corpus of powerful and profound convictions, many of them not open to logical analysis. . . .What the Modernists have done . . . [is] to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. What they have left, once they have achieved their imprudent scavenging, is hardly more than a row of hollow platitudes, as empty [of] psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes. . . . Religion is something else again-in Henrik Ibsen's phrase, something far more deep-down-diving and mud-upbringing. Dr. Machen tried to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Muhammad [i.e., Calvin]. He failed-but he was undoubtedly right.-- H. L. Mencken, "Dr. Fundamentalis", an obituary of Rev. J. Gresham Machen, Baltimore Evening Sun (January 18, 1937), 2nd Section, p. 15.

Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of our intellectual elites. Not bolshevism, which Stalin liquidated along with the old Bolsheviks; not Nazism, which perished with Hitler in his Berlin bunker; not fascism, which was left hanging upside down from a lamppost, along with Mussolini and his mistress&emdash;none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness on our civilization, but liberalism. A solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish. -- Macolm Muggeridge, "The Great Liberal Death Wish", 1977

For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now when, alas! it is an error over spreading, as a snare, the whole earth . . . Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another . . . It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy . . . Since then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man . . . Religion is in no sense the bond of society . . . Instead of the Church's authority and teaching, they would substitute first of all a universal and a thoroughly secular education . . . As to Religion, it is a private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but which of course he must pay for, and which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance.
J H Newman, Biglietto speech, upon becoming a Cardinal in 1879. From John Henry Newman: A Biography, by Ian Ker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 720-721; also excerpts from Newman Today, ed. Stanley L. Jaki, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989, from chapter "Newman and Liberalism," by Marvin R. O'Connell, pp. 88-89

With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent - not to say toddlerlike - idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums. That liberals aren't enamored of real freedom may have something to do with responsibility - that cumbersome backpack which all free men have to lug on life's aerobic nature hike. The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology, women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion AND capital punishment. -- --P. J. O'Rourke

...I have long suspected that there is a parallel between the attitudes of many liberals today and the way the French took shelter under the American nuclear umbrella during the Cold War while simultaneously gratifying themselves with luxuriant outbursts of contempt against us. Such liberals, I think, are not quite so unhappy as they profess to be that there is a force in this country whose very existence helps set limits to libertine tendencies that they themselves worry about, especially when they have children, but that they do not know how to restrain and would lack the courage to fight even if they were in command of the necessary arguments. And so they rely on the 'nuclear umbrella' of the Christian right, while denouncing it all the more loudly as they quietly benefit from its protection.
Norman Podhoretz, _National Review_, April 3, 2000

The majority of Irish people have had enough of intolerance dressed up as liberalism.
Rosemary Scallon (Dana) The Times 13.10.97

Liberal' is what socialists call themselves when they don't want you to understand that they plan to take away your rights, your property, and eventually your life. -- L. Neil Smith & Aaron Zelman, via Alexander Hope

One of the more frequently recurring buzzwords of the contemporary anointed [liberals] is "complex", often said with a sense of superiority toward those who disagree with them--the latter being labelled "simplistic." The real world, of course, is more complex than any statement that anyone can make about it, whether that statement is in three words or in three volumes ... Complex phenomena may, of course, also have complex causes. But the _a priori _ dogma that they cannot have simple causes is part of the "complex" complex. It is one more way of seeming to argue, without actually making any argument. It is also one more example of the presumption of superior wisdom and/or virtue that is at the heart of the vision of the anointed ... Merely labelling an analysis "oversimplified" on _a priori _ grounds puts the cart before the horse, by evading responsibility for first demonstrating the falsity of its conclusions.
Thomas Sowell

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face. Thomas Sowell

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help. -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

But who is Christ for us?... To talk of a Father God who has a divine-human son by a virgin woman is a mythology that our generation would never have created and, obviously, could not use. To speak of a Father God so enraged by human evil that he requires propitiation for our sins that we cannot pay and thus demands the death of the divine-human son as a guilt offering is a ludicrous idea to our century. The sacrificial concept that focuses on the saving blood of Jesus that somehow washes me clean, so popular in evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is by and large repugnant to us today. To see human life as fallen from a pristine and good creation necessitating a diving rescue by the God-man is not to understand the most elementary aspect of our evolutionary history. To view human life as depraved or as victimized by original sin is to literalize a premodern anthropology and a premodern psychology." John Shelley Spong, "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism" (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991) p. 236.

Almost all modern liberal thought begins with the bedrock assumption that humans are basically good. Within this moral horizon something such as terrorism cannot really exist, except as a manifestation of injustice, or unfairness, or lack of decent social services. -- Adam Wolfson