LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating, and it's one of my favorite quotes. I clipped it from a letter-to-the-editor in the Boston Globe about 10 years ago, before an off-year election when local progressive Mark Roosevelt was running for governor and Kennedy for Senate re-election. I have no idea now who the writer was.

The writer asks, "Why am I going to voter for Kennedy and Roosevelt? It has to with something my pappy used to say."

"He said, 'Son, outside of Mother Theresa, there are basically two kinds of people: those that live their lives in an essentially selfish manner and feel guilty about it. They're called liberals. And those who live their lives in an essentially selfish manner and are proud of it. They're called conservatives. The first may be capable, on occasion,of responding to an ideal higher than their own self-interest; the second don't even know that such things exist."