Ideology Quotes

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Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product...

A political ideology is a very handy thing to have. It's a real time-saver, because it tells you what you think about things you know nothing about.

Hendrik Hertzberg

While the act of blocking and directing the Jews to Israel is ethically dubious, it was justified by the Zionist ideology which asserts that a normalization of the Jewish situation—in other words, concentrating the Jewish people in its own territory—is the only thing that will save us from another Holocaust and, according to some people, will even speed up the Messiah's arrival.

There is a strong strain of Protestant masochism in this [Nietzsche's] assault on morality and ideology. … Framing this perspective is the Protest image of the utterly self-reliant, responsible individual.

Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but Muslims ideology which has to be preserved which has come to us a precious gift and treasure and which we hope, others will share with us.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.

Marshall McLuhan

The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization.

Leszek Kołakowski

Although the Great Leader told us that we have to let the people eat rice with meat soup, wear silk clothes and live in a tiled roof house, we have not accomplished his will.… We have already reached the status of a strong country in the military field, let alone politics and ideology, but there are still quite a number of things lacking in people's lives. I am trying to implement his will by solving these problems.

The problem is not merely that of the transformation of Christianity into a state religion but of the diffusion of this faith that has stopped being a faith and has become a collective ideology, a kind of manifestation of thought that collects all the commonplaces, the legends, the miracles, the prophecies, the apocalypses, the thaumaturgies, and formulates for the people a facile, moralistic, and constructive set of beliefs.

As China is the one nation with the size, population, ideology and power to contest the United States for hegemony in Asia, is war inevitable? Answer: No more inevitable than was war between Germany and Great Britain in 1914.

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers... Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.

Once again we see Islam self-detonate (if you'll pardon the expression) and show once again why it's about as welcome on this planet as an asteroid. Once again we see thousands of Islamic nutcases take time out from beating up their wives to show their sensitive side. How? By smashing up the towns they live in, egged on by clerical ignoramuses whose motives are even lower than the literacy level of their followers. And once again we in the civilised world are being urged to censor ourselves out of respect for a religion that violates the human rights of half the people on the planet and that doubles as a political ideology indistinguishable from Nazism. It would be funny if it wasn't so obscene.

I've come here to warn about another danger, the Islam. The Islam is masquerading as a religion but really has a different goal; world domination, a holy war, the sharia and the end of separation of church and state. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands your respect but does not respect you.

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

Peoples' senses of humor tend to go about as far as their ideology.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current...

The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. … Psychologically, the father is … replaced by the world of things.

No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the values, insecurities, goals of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer.

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

You cannot be cruel to someone if you fully understand what it is to be them. You have to somehow screen that out. You have to say to yourself, "They're not really humans." Or you have to bring into line some sort of powerful ideology or some crazed religious certainty in order to blot out that human instinct.

Modernism represents a true kind of living. Modernism is not about form or method or the works of a few artists, but rather about a necessary way of living. And only this kind of lifestyle can save China, because if we don't have modernism, then we will die under the grasp of one or another ideology. Modernism at least says that every person is free and needs to honestly encounter his own life.

A good skeptical mind doesn't waste itself on drugs or ideology, and prefers to break the rules in our minds, in the form of humor, rather than in real life.

Mark Rosenfelder