Best 276 quotes in «ideology quotes» category

...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.

All believers assert that they were lucky enough to be born in the religious community to which they belong. All other religions are mystification and distortion of reality. No other community can be as moral as their community, because they don’t obey the divine rules as their community, and they destroy them more or less. That is why for believers only their religious community can be an ideal example for imitation of others, only their holy scriptures and texts hold the absolute truth concerning everything. Similarly, all patriots believe that they are lucky that they were born in the society to which they belong. They sincerely believe that only their historical texts, with their interpretation, can be absolutely correct. No other social community can be as brave and humanistic as they are. For patriots, their social community can be or must have been the center of global historical progress. As a result, both religion and history give you self-confidence and honor, but instead take critical thinking from you. What is first-rate for a reasonable agnostic? — to be self-confident and proud, or increase an intuition that there must be something wrong and illusory moments in any religious or historical ideology. The difference between ideology and science, which may be the only criteria for a reasonable agnostic, is that any ideology divides humans into yours and ours, bad and good, respectively, but for science such badness and goodness don’t exist -- there are only individuals with the brain and mind, desires and emotions, and so on, and so forth.

All forms of dogmatic thought create certain problems to the intellect, confining it to very narrow limits. The thought that is impossible to be criticized is going sooner or later to manipulate your own thought. The critical thinking area of the brain would immediately be blocked, if a person is convinced to blindly believe in the existence of some sacred texts or fundamental canons, which are allegedly representation of God's will or some 'perfect' human mind. As soon as emerges such an inevitable belief, the brain automatically begins to set some limits to its function, trying to give the dogmatic thought some rational sense with the help of science and logic, if it is possible, or merely to adjust blind imitation of them without any rational explanation and understanding, if it is impossible. It is very obvious fact that no intelligence can develop in that condition. Whatever rational and logical meaning you can find there, it is because of the brain activity, which gives dogmatism some reasonable sense. Without the brain activity, it is just a symbolism or merely absurdism. If this is so, why should any intelligence need the existence of any dogmatism, regardless of whether it is a religion or some kind of ideological doctrine?

All societies that maintain armies maintain the belief that some things are more valuable than life itself.

Always be respectful and open-minded when listening to another man's beliefs. What you reject today could be your mantra tomorrow. Man's evolution is all about transformations. An unexpected experience you have one day can change you forever.

And suddenly the driver remembered how he'd once promised himself that if he became God in the end, he'd be merciful and kind, and would listen to all His creatures. So when he saw Eddie from way up in his driver's seat, he simply couldn't go through with it, and in spite of all his ideology and his simple arithmetic, he opened the door, and Eddie got on

Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65)

As a professional, the teacher is "objective" when presenting the school curriculum: she doesn't "take sides," or "get political." However, the ideology of the status quo is built into the curriculum. The professional's objectivity, then, boils down to not challenging this built-in ideology.

As the saying goes, ‘he who has a hammer sees everything as a nail’. If you approach a problem from a particular theoretical point of view, you will end up asking only certain questions and answering them in particular ways. You might be lucky, and the problem you are facing might be a ‘nail’ for which your ‘hammer’ is the most appropriate tool. But, more often than not, you will need to have an array of tools available to you. You are bound to have your favourite theory. There is nothing wrong with using one or two more than others — we all do. But please don’t be a man (or a woman) with a hammer — still less someone unaware that there are other tools available. To extend the analogy, use a Swiss army knife instead, with different tools for different tasks.­

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.

An ideologue – one who thinks ideologically – can't lose. He can't lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and are not subject to the facts. There is no possible argument, observation or experiment that could disprove a firm ideological belief for the very simple reason that an ideologue will not accept any argument, observation or experiment as constituting disproof.

At very best there are two problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler of a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and of those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction.

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

Beneath the pseudo-scientific terminology one can in each case recognize a phantasy of which almost every element is to be found in phantasies which were already current in medieval Europe. The final, decisive battle of the Elect (be they the ‘Aryan race’ or the ‘proletariat’) against the hosts of evil (be they the Jews or the ‘bourgeoisie’); a dispensation on which the Elect are to be most amply compensated for all their sufferings by the joys of total domination or of total community or of both together; a world purified of all evil and in which history is to find its consummation - these ancient imaginings are with us still.

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

Be mad - be drunk - be obsessed, not for a guru, messiah, doctrine or ideology, but for an idea - a novel, original idea with the potential for doing good in the world.

But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

At the very best there are two major problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.

Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology.

But if Cravaggio really is the first master of modern age to be slighted by reason of his artistic worth, then the baroque signifies an important turning point in the relationship between art and the public - namely, the end of the "aesthetic culture" which begins with the Renaissance and the beginning of the more rigid distinction between content and form in which formal perfection no longer serves as excuses for any ideological lapse.

But there is a difference between the systematic evil of totalitarianism and the ordinary corruption we find in all institutions, at all times. Totalitarianism is a system of highly organized murder and oppression, driven by ideology. American institutions, in comparison, were not created to facilitate mass murder and dictatorship.

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

Clouds are on top for a reason. They float so high because they refuse to carry any burden!

Common man does not speculate about the great problems. With regard to them he relies upon other people's authority, he behaves as "every decent fellow must behave,'' he is like a sheep in the herd. It is precisely this intellectual inertia that characterizes a man as a common man. Yet the common man does choose. He chooses to adopt traditional patterns or patterns adopted by other people because he is convinced that this procedure is best fitted to achieve his own welfare. And he is ready to change his ideology and consequently his mode of action whenever he becomes convinced that this would better serve his own interests.

Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.

Communism looked good on paper, you know' — but how many people who say that even know what communism looks like on paper?

Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

CAIR is still trying to promote its strange claim that criticism of its ideology is racist....The ridiculous claims that criticism of Islam is an act of bigotry fail to take into account the fact that former Muslims like Bosch, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Firoozeh Bazrafkan have been some of the sharpest critics of the ideology. Did they also change races?

Creating consent (hegemony) is never a simple act. It is rather the result of the social structures and the cultural patterns that dictates for each group its behavior and for each institutions its practices.

Dependency on drugs is quite easily proclaimed by the so-called intellectual society as lethal, while that very society has been ever-lastingly dependent upon varied forms of ideologies, be it religious, atheistic, political or any other. They say, “don’t do drugs for it’s dangerous for you”, but they never say, “don’t do ideology for it’s dangerous for your society”.

Der Pragmatismus ersetzt uns alles, was früher die großen Ideen, die Ideologien und Religionen, der Glaube an Friede, Menschenrechte und Demokratie zu bieten hatten. Der Pragmatismus hält uns davon ab, zu Verbrechern zu werden, oder er macht uns zu solchen, wenn es nötig ist. Er legitimiert das Bestehen von Rechtssystem, Familie und Arbeit, er lässt uns nett sein und empfiehlt, sich ein angenehmes Äußeres zu erwerben. Nachdem wir uns aller Zwänge nach und nach erledigt haben, sorgt ein einziger Betreuer für uns: Pragmatismus.

Die Partei weiß genau, daß sie nur jene zu fürchten hat, welche die Ideale ernst nehmen, die sie zu verkörpern vorgibt.

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.

Even if we take into account only atavism, family likenesses, it is inevitable that the uncle who delivers the lecture should have more or less the same faults as the nephew whom he has been deputed to scold. Nor is the uncle in the least hypocritical in so doing, taken in as he is by the faculty that people have of believing, in every fresh experience, that ‘this is quite different,’ a faculty which allows them to adopt artistic, political and other errors without perceiving that they are the same errors which they exposed, ten years ago, in another school of painters, whom they condemned, another political affair which, they considered, merited a loathing that they no longer feel, and espouse those errors without recognising them in a fresh disguise.

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.

Everyone thinks money is the capital needed to start up a business or any project of choice. I, however, disagree with that ideology. Money is not the capital that you need. Time is the real capital that anyone needs to start up any project.

Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious complicity with them, betraying its elitism, sexism or individualism in the very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘unpolitical’ language it finds natural to use of the literary text. It assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history or tradition. Other things matter too, of course — this individual is in personal relationship with others, and we are always much more than readers — but it is notable how often such individual consciousness, set in its small circle of relationships, ends up as the touchstone of all else. The further we move from the rich inwardness of the personal life, of which literature is the supreme exemplar, the more drab, mechanical and impersonal existence becomes. It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm, much as the former attitude may shudder at the latter: it reflects the values of a political system which subordinates the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise.

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action.

Failure and disillusionment are realities, but ideologies are made of dreams. And dreams, it would seem, do not fade easily.

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature. "A gift of life," I responded, "if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love them." "Do you believe love is the strongest emotion?" he asked. "Do you know any stronger?" "Yes, interest." "By which you probably mean a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, is that it?" "Let's agree on that definition!" he said with a laugh. "Good night!" We had arrived again at the Leverkühn house, and he opened his front door.

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.

For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.

Freedom is that you harness from being a slave to the one you love.

Great men are allowed to spill the blood of others.

Human believe what they want to believe and individual could believe according to his mind that why human never has any agreement on one ideology.

Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism--that to live and work *for an idea*is man's calling, and according to the faithfulness its fulfilment his *human worth* is measured