323 Quotes About Ideology

Those two great genies of wishful fulfillment – messianic fervor and technological power – have spotted each other. If they come together, the world, as it is now known, will no longer exist.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

Perhaps no two events ever united so intimately and forceably to combat and expel prejudice, as the Revolution of America, and the Alliance with France. Their effects are felt, and their influence already extends as well to the old world as the new. Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution, more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

When people don’t travel to places different from those they inhabit in their routines they become habituated to the actualities of their worlds. They see things as one, knowing what they see is true. Nothing in their experience has the possibility of exposing the frailty of their illusions, of self, of world, of morality and each other.

The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy.

But the consequences of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, IN EFFECT, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations as special interest groups. The political engagement of the various Christian groups is certainly legal, but in ways that are undoubtedly unintended, it has also been counterproductive of the ends to which they aspire.

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia.

Etiquette, Seward had once told Jamison, was all that mattered. Ideologies waxed and waned, religions developed and eroded, political parties rose and fell from power. Only courtesy remained one of the few things valued by all civilized men.