# Barry Goldwater — "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" > [!quote] "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." > — Barry Goldwater, Republican National Convention acceptance speech, San Francisco, July 16, 1964 ## Context The climax of Goldwater's acceptance speech as the 1964 Republican nominee — the line (written by speechwriter Karl Hess) that defined his campaign and alarmed the party's moderate establishment. Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, but his nomination marked the conservative movement's capture of the GOP from its Eastern moderate wing. ## Why this matters The hinge quote of [[Movement Conservatism]]'s origin story: the moment the American right embraced ideological purity over moderation as a virtue, not a liability. Defenders read it as a principled defense of liberty; critics read it as the licensing of extremism that runs forward through [[the New Right]] to the present. Either way it is the canonical 1964 marker historians use to date the modern conservative movement's arrival. ## Verification - **Full text:** [American Yawp Reader](https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/27-the-sixties/barry-goldwater-republican-nomination-acceptance-speech-1964/); [Goldwater — Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed. Authorship of the line is attributed to Karl Hess (drawing on a Cicero paraphrase). ## Related quotes - [[Pat Buchanan - religious war for the soul of America]] — the next-generation escalation of the same purist, combative conservative posture. - Featured in [[Politics as Holy War]] — the proto-Manichaean absolutism that seeds the theological frame.