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The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

The future of Conservatism lies in our beliefs and values, not by throwing them away. We need to shed associations that bind us to past failures, but hold faith with those things that make us Conservatives.

Lest conservatives be too proud, it's worth recalling that conservatism's rise was decisively enabled by liberalism's weakness.

Conservatives conserve and that is why they became irrelevant.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

I didn't come up through the ranks of the conservative movement... I came to these revelations about my own personal politics in a realm in which those books, those ideas, the canon of conservatism, is nonexistent.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism.

I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?