Ideology Quotes

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It is often said that the Buddha's teaching is only a raft to help you cross the river, a finger pointing to the moon. Don't maistake the finger for the moon. The raft is not the shore. If we cling to the raft, if we cling to the finger, we miss everything. We cannot, in the name of the finger or the raft kill each other. Human life is more precious than any ideology, any doctrine.

There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however absurd and vicious, which promises vast action.

If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.

Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.

The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology.... For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, MA...

Francis Fukuyama

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.

Katherine Losse

Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail...

Gerhard Richter

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

In the nineteenth century C.E., a small but influential group of German scholars led by Karl Otfried Müller decided that the ancient Greek authors did not know what they were talking about—that their traditions of external influences were simply "myths." …They were convinced that the principle of historical explanation was race, and they believed they had discovered the "scientific laws of race." …only the white race...had the natural ability to create advanced civilizations....This "racial science" …served as a useful ideology to explain the "natural right" of white Europeans to dominate the darker peoples of the world.

Clifford D. Conner

In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters.

Ludwig von Mises

The enemy of the market is not ideology but the engineer.

John Kenneth Galbraith

We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

The strongest streak in the American character is a fierce pragmatism that mistrust blind ideology of every stripe and insists on finding what really works.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Our enemies may be irrational, even outright insane, driven by nationalism, religion, ethnicity or ideology. They do not fear the United States for its diplomatic skills or the number of automobiles and software programs it produces. They respect only the firepower of our tanks, planes and helicopter gunships.

On the Marxist ideology:

It is only natural that the people will discard some theses which are Utopian because they were formulated by our predecessors within the limits of their historical conditions. It is also natural that the people will reject dogmatic interpretations of Marxism and erroneous viewpoints imposed on it, and will further develop the theory of scientific socialism on the basis of new practice.