Quotes About Ideology

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
― Nelson Mandela

“When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
― Slavoj Žižek

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
― Anthony de Mello

“A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.”
― Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction

“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...”
― V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds

“They don't know it, but they are doing it.”
― Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.”
― James W. Sire

“In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays

“Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
― Terence McKenna

“To err is human, to persist in error is diabolical.”
― Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences

“All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.”
― Clive James

“...the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me forever.”
― Marcel Theroux, Far North

“But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human?

“I honestly do not know if love vanquishes death as our traditional faiths teach but I do know that our vulnerabilities trump our ideologies and that love leavens the purity and logic of our beliefs propelling us to connect as the fiercely gracious human beings we are.”
― Irwin Kula

“In public affairs men are often better pleased that the truth, though known to everybody, should be wrapped up under a decent cover than if it were exposed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world.”
― David Hume, The History of England 1

“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“...we're also extremely sensitive to the difference between literacy and ideology. It is our belief that the first helps to thwart intolerance, challenge dogma, and reinforce our common humanity. The second does the opposite.”
― Greg Mortenson, Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture.”
― Charles Colson

“The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception of a righteous heart, then he has given his heart to man.”
― Criss Jami

“The last time I heard an orthodox Marxist statement that was music to my ears was from a member of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, during the mass slaughter in the country. 'The terms Hutu and Tutsi,' he said severely, 'are merely ideological constructs, describing different relationships to the means and mode of production.' But of course!”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

“Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ...”
― Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

“E nevoie de un dușman ca să-i dai poporului o speranță. Cineva a spus că patriotismul e ultimul refugiu al canaliilor: cine nu are principii morale se înfășoară de obicei într-un steag, iar bastarzii fac întotdeauna apel la puritatea stirpei lor. Identitatea națională este ultima resursă a dezmoșteniților. Or, simțul identității se întemeiază pe ură, ura împotriva celui ce nu-i identic. Trebuie să cultivi ura ca patos cetățenesc. Dușmanul e prietenul popoarelor. E nevoie oricând de cineva demn de a fi urât ca să te simți justificat în propria-ți mizerie. Ura este adevărata pasiune primordială. Iubirea reprezintă o situație anormală.”
― Umberto Eco, Il cimitero di Praga

“Diese jungen Menschen hatten keine Wünsche, keine Überzeugungen, geschweige denn Ideale, sie strebten keinen bestimmten Beruf an, wollten weder politischen Einfluss noch eine glückliche Familie, keine Kinder, keine Hausiere und keine Heimat, und sehnten sich ebenso wenig nach Abenteuern und Revolten wie nach der Ruhe und dem Frieden des Althergebrachten. Überdies hatten sie aufgehört, Spaß als einen Wert zu betrachten. Freizeit und Nichtfreizeit waren gleichermaßen anstrengend und unterschieden sich in erster Linie durch die Frage, ob man Geld verdiente oder ausgab. Hobbys zum Totschlagen der Zeit waren überflüssig, da die Zeit auch von selbst verging. Fernsehen war langweilig, die Literaturszene tot, und im Kino liefen seit Jahren nur Varianten auf drei oder vier verschiedener Filme. Diskotheken waren etwas für Liebhaber von Dummheit und schlechter Musik, und auf Schostakowitsch konnte man nicht tanzen. Diese Jugend hatte aufgehört, sich für industriell geschneiderte Moden, Identitäten, Heldenfiguren und Feindbilder zu interessieren. Weniger als jede Generation vor ihrer bildete sie eine Generation. Sie war einfach da, die Sippschaft eines interimistischen Zeitalters. ”
― Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb

“In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world.”
― Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang

“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

“Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain--where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“A te închipui un element necesar în ordinea universului echivalează, pentru noi, oamenii cu lecturi serioase, cu ceea ce e superstiția pentru analfabeți. Nu se schimbă lumea cu ideile. Persoanele cu puține idei sunt mai puțin supuse erorii, se iau după ceea ce fac toți și nu deranjează pe nimeni, și reușesc, se îmbogățesc, ajung la poziții solide, deputați, oameni cu decorații, oameni de litere renumiți, academicieni, jurnaliști. Poți să mai fii nerod când îți faci așa de bine propriile afaceri? Prostul sunt eu, care am vrut să mă bat cu morile de vânt.”
― Umberto Eco, Il cimitero di Praga