Quotes About Ideology

El asesinato a menudo les parece virtuoso a los revolucionarios.

Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.

Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

Las personas, al fin y al cabo, se unen a bandos políticos con los que comparten narrativas morales, y una vez que han aceptado una narrativa particular, se ciegan a otros mundos morales alternativos.

Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39

What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life.

In the book I define conservatism, as I believe it is fit upon four categories of principle: respect for The Constitution, respect for life, less government, and personal responsibility.

For many of the same reasons, machines tend to be a force for moderation. They must engage in transactional politics to survive, and that often requires them to put ideology aside, or at least to dial it back, in the interests of holding power.

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin's Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives.

The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery

I have emphasized the religious roots of dishonoring the enemy and its toxic psychological results. However, any ideology that debases the enemy endangers the lives of soldiers while they fight.

Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.

Wenn die Partei es verlangt, ist ein wahrer Bolschewik bereit zu glauben, dass Schwarz Weiß ist und Weiß Schwarz.«

ejidos." The teaching centers were "foci for ideological fermentation

London, at the same time, Isaac Deutscher distinguished between 'heretics' and 'renegades' (communists who became anti-Stalinist and those who became anti-communist), in a definition that sought not to cast anathemas but rather to describe a psychological attitude and a mental habitus.

the idea of Pakistan was very strongly opposed by the Islamic religious scholars of India. The reason for that was, among others, an argument on the part of the ulema, the religious scholars of Islam in India, that nationalism was an anti-Islamic ideology, because nationalism proceeds to create boundaries where Islam is a faith without boundaries. It interferes with the universalism that is the Koranic commitment of Islam. It is a universal religion that will not be subject to drawn boundaries.

the Wehrmacht was always something different from the Nazis. We always believed that the Wehrmacht stood as a contrast to the Nazis.53.

The logic of Michelangelo's David, Beethoven's quartets and Einstein's physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Seventy years after Marx's death, one third of the human race lived under regimes ruled by communist parties which claimed to represent his ideas and realise his aspirations.

Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way—and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed

It must be made quite clear—terrifying though it is—that we are immediately faced with the decision: National Socialist or Christian . . .

His opposition to self-indulgent emotionalism and "phraseology" was the same as ever; his opposition to the National Socialists and all they represented was the same as ever.

Every culture and era flatters itself that we are finally seeing what previous eras and cultures could not see because of their own blinders and ideological lenses.

Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. —HEINRICH HEINE