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Quotes About Ideology

telling you things which he not merely knew were not true, but which he knew that you knew were not true. A bitter lesson you had to learn, soon or late, that truth had no meaning to any Communist; the only question that concerned him was the advancement of his cause.
~ Upton Sinclair
National Socialism versus true Socialism, racism versus humanity—that was the struggle between Satan and God in the modern world.
~ Upton Sinclair
When, in answer to a question, Herr Budd stated that he was a non-political person, that pleased everyone, for the Nazis wanted all the world to be non-political except themselves.
~ Upton Sinclair
Brothers have fought against brothers, and fathers against sons, in all civil wars; and here was a new kind of war, spreading rapidly all over the earth: National Socialism against true Socialism, racialism against the brotherhood of humanity.
~ Upton Sinclair
The Rightists called themselves America Firsters, and their opponents called them Fascists; the Leftists called themselves Liberals, and their opponents called them Reds.
~ Upton Sinclair
The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label.
~ Upton Sinclair
Generalissimo Franco was a soldier, a crusader for Christianity as he conceived it, but he was a poor administrator and no economist; his only conception of government was to kill all the people who did not agree with his ideas, or at least to shut them behind bars and feed them very badly. Carpenters and masons, steelworkers and miners, were dead or dying by the thousands, and did not contribute to the restoration of the shattered cities of Spain.
~ Upton Sinclair
Huey Long, unfortunately, had been shot; a shrewd devil, he had said: "It will be easy to bring Fascism in America. Just call it Anti-Fascism.
~ Upton Sinclair
But you know how our kind of people are; we don't like violence and find it hard to believe in. Very sadly I'm beginning to wonder if we Socialists aren't caught between two millstones and destined to be ground up. We think that when we've educated the people and got a majority of the votes, the matter is settled. That is supposed to be the rule in the political game.
~ Upton Sinclair
When the rich go over-board, politically speaking, they go all the way and with all their clothes on. They have been used to having what they want, and patience is apt to be the least of their virtues. Bessie Budd had joined the Communist Party, and she followed the Party line, keeping her eyes fixed upon it so closely that she couldn't even see how it wobbled, and would be greatly irritated if you called her attention to the chart.
~ Upton Sinclair
The common people of that land of hope and glory adored their war leader, but they didn't want him as a peace leader—a distinction that was clear to them but must have been confusing to Winnie. The Labour party obtained a majority of almost two to one; they got it upon the basis of a definite program calling for the nationalization of the five most important of the nation's industries: coal, steel, transportation, communications, and finance.
~ Upton Sinclair
Capitalist governments talk about liberty but what they mean is property. If they have to choose between a Nazi and a Red, they are for the Nazi ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
~ Upton Sinclair
Each of the four would have its own idea of what Germany and the Germans ought to be and would proceed to make them over in its image: a Communist East Germany, a Socialist North-central Germany, a Big-Business, Private-Enterprise South-central Germany, and a Bourgeois Southwest Germany, hated, feared, and kept as poor as possible.
~ Upton Sinclair
No, among Catholics one did not question the purity of the Holy Virgin, and among Nazis one didn't question the honor of the Führer.
~ Upton Sinclair
Birth control advocates are shut up in concentration camps and abortionists are executed without ceremony, for the Führer must have soldiers for his future task of ruling the world.
~ Upton Sinclair
Quadratt had, so he claimed, a mailing list of a hundred and fifty thousand names, and seldom a day passed that he didn't write a speech for some Senator or Congressman to deliver. Then it would be printed as part of the Congressional Record, reprinted at a nominal cost by the Government Printing Office, and mailed out to these names, and to other lists supplied by Nazi or near-Nazi organizations scattered all over the country.
~ Upton Sinclair
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
~ Vaclav Havel
Treba podi?i mase protiv njih i sve ih uništiti kao klasu te prokletnike...Da bi ih ubili, trebalo je izjavitwi, Kulaci, to nisu ljudska bi?a, kao što su i Nijemci govorili, Jevreji, to nisu lj bi?a.
~ Vasili Grossman
The State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell. Thus was made manifest, with tragic clarity, a sacred law of life: Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.
~ Vasily Grossman
The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
~ Vasily Grossman
During the course of his life, dozens of interrogators had understood that he was neither a monarchist, nor a Socialist Revolutionary, nor a Social Democrat; that he had never been part of either the Trotskyist or the Bukharinist opposition. He had never been an Orthodox Christian or an Old Believer; nor was he a Seventh-Day Adventist.
~ Vasily Grossman
Un giorno che Å trum le aveva detto qualcosa a proposito dell'eterna giovinezza d'animo di Aleksandra Vladimirovna, Ljudmila era sbottata: «È vecchia ed egoista, altro che giovane». «Non è egoismo, il suo. La nonna è una populista» aveva detto Nadja, aggiungendo: «E i populisti sono brava gente, ma con poco cervello».
~ Vasily Grossman
for Cixous, writing from the imaginary implies the invention of "other I's," the poet is more open to otherness. She follows the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate. Poetry, like other arts, questions and transforms ideology. … This is not to say that to create, one must be homosexual, but that there is no invention without other I's, no poetry, no fiction without that of a certain homosexuality, therefore of bisexuality.
~ Verena Andermatt Conley
The larger themes of the new signature progressivism were identity politics, radical environmentalism, and redistributionism.
~ Victor Davis Hanson