Quotes About Ideology

Yet we can look at other people and, more or less, see the inadequacy of our ideological individuality. We often point out that someone "was born a bad seed and was going to turn out rotten no matter what," or someone "was destined to triumph and succeed." In fact, "it's in the stars" is still used, even though in modern intellectual circles the concepts of Fate and Destiny are

Herr Kulmbach had been saying the Führer had united the whole German nation. Which is true enough, it's just that the people making up the whole German nation don't get on with each other. But that doesn't make any difference to political unity, I suppose.

The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who's been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.

After 1789, politics ceased to be considered as the prudent management of men and circumstances, in order to become the 'realization of ideas'. Political thinking became irredeemably ideological: an imposition of ideas on political life rather than an emergence of policy from living experience.

The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

Those poor people know Communism gives them bread, while democracy gives them a vote and a Letter to the Editor.

While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.

Esta manera de considerar la filosofía sostiene la fe de Berlin en el pluralismo.

The Party member may physically reside in the United States, but he "lives" in a communist "world.

In June, 1957, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Communist Party boss, was interviewed before a nation-wide American television audience. With calm assurance he stated: ". . . I can prophesy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism. And please do not be afraid of that. Your grandchildren will not understand how their grandparents did not understand the progressive nature of a socialist society.

Communists are not liberals.

Communism is the very opposite of liberalism. Liberalism means increased rights for the citizen; a curb on the powers of the central government; freedom of speech, religion, and the press.

Communists are not progressives.

process of "automatic osmosis" — the seeping of predigested thoughts along the Party line into all subordinate minds, disciplined to accept. The members become ideological sleepwalkers, drugged into complete obedience by an unconscious discipline.

The growth of revolutionary fervour in individual participants and its spread to ever wider sections of the population must primarily be the result of struggle itself, not the distillation of thought or the prescription of correct ideology by others.

1980, Leah and Sophie voted for Reagan. My father wouldn't speak to them for six months.

Increasingly I perceived myself as being neither on the left nor the right but as believing in a distinct "third position," mistrustful of big government of whatever political hue, which I perceived in the Orwellian sense as being Big Brother, the crusher of freedom.

When Chesterton says we must not trust humanity, he especially reminds us not to put too much trust in politics or in whatever political party we pick. We generally expect too much from political parties, but none of them is based on any permanent philosophy, and, because of that, at some point they will conflict with faith.

Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.

What really matters is what you believe.

Contrary to the popular view, Marx did not predict the formation of communist countries, with which he is so closely identified. Rather, he predicted that capitalism would be utterly successful on a number of fronts.

The best that workers can hope for is a condition of full employment, and that can be achieved only by increasing production at a rate matching the growth of the population. This solution, however, was not enough for the most prominent thinker of classical liberal ideology