Quotes About Ideology

You have to put aside your ideology. Howsoever beautiful it looks, howsoever systematic it looks, howsoever philosophical you have made and decorated it, you have to put it aside and see within. That's the whole method of meditation, awareness, watchfulness.

If you want to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?

Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind," wrote novelist and screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald

If I told you I was a Republican and you were a Democrat, no matter what I said after that, it would be tempered with your opinions.

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.

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?

There is no greater way to ensure that universities remain a hotbed of leftist thought than to guarantee that professors knight their own successors. But that's basically how the Ph.D. system works, with sitting professors approving the work of would-be professors.

Richard Dreyfuss, when we were doing 'American Graffiti,' was pumping me to vote for McGovern. But I think I wound up going for Nixon. I thought he could get us out of the Vietnam War quickly. Ha.

I joined the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) in the early '80s. I'd be in it still but it was wound up at the end of the nineties.

Wow, a left-wing leader getting a good reception at a rock festival. What kind of crazy world is it we live in that that kind of thing happens?

There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.

It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and has changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police.

La théorie révolutionnaire est maintenant ennemie de toute idéologie révolutionnaire, et elle sait qu'elle l'est.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist. [In an open letter to Upton Sinclair, printed in The American Mercury, June 1936]

A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Franco's Spain.

He cultivated ideological fuzziness.

Eugene Debs entered jail a moderate Unionist and emerged a Socialist.