Quotes about ideology

The theorists make high-minded speeches. Their followers cheer and applaud—briefly—and then they get back to the business of appropriating everything of value.

"We're at a very primitive stage of mankind," Nolan declared, "that's what people don't understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you've got a catalogue of ape behaviour. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you're reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another."

Only one thing never changes – the human heart. Revolutions and ideologies may lacerate it, even break it, but they cannot change its essence. After Fascism and Communism and Capitalism and Socialism are over and forgotten as completely as slavery and the old South, that same headstrong human heart will be clamoring for the old things it wept for in Eden – love and a chance to be noble, laughter and a chance to adore something, someone, somewhere. (Ch. 3)

Maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favor humans over ideology, and those who favor ideology over humans. I prefer humans to ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.

Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it.

“Ideology is all there is.”

“Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.”

You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I’ll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed. For instance, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, where I was just working, there is a political sect, the Communists, who, in the territory under their control, forbid the teaching of certain well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the world picture demanded by their political doctrines. And on the same sector, a religious sect recently tried, in some sections successfully, to outlaw of the teaching of evolution by natural selection.

If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.

Myth is depoliticized speech.

Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.

Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become.

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.