Quotes About Ideology

This is not another Cold War that we're entering into," he said. "After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology." He was tragically wrong.

Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.

Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.

If you have not yet heard it, my dear old-fashioned friends, it has now been proved that the rational is the insane.

The problem is that political Islam believes in Caliphate.

It was not so much, then, that people like the rapper Danis Cuspert and Dunya were brainwashed into an ideology of radicalism; they simply lacked the intellectual and psychological coping skills to channel their newly found beliefs into more productive and legal means: activism, charity work, human rights law, citizen journalism.

Ideological fixation is the result of the ever-present tensions and conflicts between our normative wishes and interpretation of reality.

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

Leftists' mustaches covered their upper lips, to distinguish them from the Muslims, who carved out a razor-thin line between upper lip and mustache. Some Muslims also grew beards or what stubble they could muster. The leftist women wore khaki or dull green—large, loose shirts over loose trousers—and the Muslim girls scarves or chadors. In between these two immutable rivers stood the non-political students, who were all mechanically branded as monarchists.

Now that the mullahs ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power, an ideology. It was this ideological approach to faith that differentiated those in power from millions of ordinary citizens, believers like Mahshid, Manna and Yassi, who found the Islamic Republic their worst enemy.

All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.

But she and my grandfather had no firm ideological or partisan leanings to speak of, beyond what they considered to be common sense.

the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communists, I thought; it was true for all of us.

The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology—the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it.

Lo que de verdad tiene el pensamiento positivo de ideología conservadora es su apego al sistema, con todas sus desigualdades y sus abusos de poder.

Los sacerdotes que predican el pensamiento positivo en Estados Unidos seguramente se quedarán desolados si ven que se habla de ellos en el mismo capítulo (y hasta en el mismo libro) que de los censores y propagandistas del estalinismo.

La gran ventaja de este pensamiento positivo al estilo americano es que uno puede contar con que sean las personas quienes se lo impongan a sí mismas. Los regímenes estalinistas tenían que apoyarse en el aparato del Estado (escuelas, policía secreta, etcétera) para imponer el optimismo, pero las democracias capitalistas confían en el mercado para que les haga el trabajo.

Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.

Communism? Most people have no idea what it is. I do not exaggerate. Look around this restaurant, ask any of these fine citizens. 'Excuse me, sir, I've been thinking of an idea, a bunch of working people owning the means of their own production. What do you make of that?' You know, he might be all for it.

They won't admit to being bigots, so they want him fired for being a communist. Like they even know what a communist is!