Selected ideology quotes

1. It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.

2. When our party had only seven men, it already had two principles. First, it wanted to be a party with a true ideology. And second, it wanted to be the one and only power in Germany.

3. Bolshevism is knocking at our gates, we can't afford to let it in...We must keep America whole and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy.

4. Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.

5. I have the feeling that this Moscow Pact will at some time or other exact vengeance upon National Socialism.

6. Today a new faith is stirring: the myth of blood, the faith that along with blood we are defending the divine nature of man as a whole.

7. Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.

8. There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.

9. The tolerant liberal suddenly becomes very intolerant when their official religion is challenged.

10. This is the way addled liberals really think. Even as they champion sucking the brains out of little babies, they think of themselves as indelibly compassionate because they favor an overweening, behemoth federal government.

11. Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

12. First of all, we have to understand what communism is. I mean, to me, real communism, the Soviet communism, is basically a mask for Bolshevism, which is a mask for Judaism.

13. Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.

14. Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

15. Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.

16. Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It's not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York.

17. One of the biggest differences between liberalism and conservativism these days, is that conservativism isn't what conservativism should be, and liberalism is what liberalism ought not to be.

18. One of the most distinguishing differences between liberals and conservatives in America is that the average Liberal feels that we should have little reservation about killing the unborn, while the average Conservative feels it is better to wait until after they are born before we kill them.

19. There is one great truth in western politics that I have been able to see, and that is this: The more left wing your political ideals are, the more naive a person you are likely to be. The more right wing your political ideals are, the more evil a person you are likely to be. Choosing a political standpoint is largely a matter of deciding which failure as a human you are more comfortable with.

20. Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

21. All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

22. Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.

23. Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

24. The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

25. For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.

26. The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

27. The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

28. The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.

29. Communism is in conflict with human nature.

30. It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

31. Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution. The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues!

32. I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.

33. I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.

34. As hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

35. My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.

36. To accept capitalism and Free Enterprise as articles of faith without agreeing that we must be free to consider whether what is offered is free and freeing is itself enslavement.

37. Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

38. The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.

39. Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness.

40. The recognition of Russia on November 16, 1933, started forces which were to have considerable influence in the attempt to collectivize the United States.

41. Oh, in the Name of the Sweet Christ Hammered Up, why do you have to play that?

42. We simply believed.

43. We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

44. Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

45. Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the 'legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago.' There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.

46. Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.

47. Today we face many problems. Some are created essentially by ourselves based on divisions due to ideology, religion, race, economic status, or other factors. Therefore, the time has come for us to think on a deeper level, on the human level, and from that level we should appreciate and respect the sameness of others as human beings.

48. Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

49. Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.

50. The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin - at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the international set-up ... The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that. ... The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. ... the Spanish civil war demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn't give arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished.

51. A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

52. When for years a doctrine is foretold of the qualification that the Slavs are an inferior race and the Hebrew aren't quite human individuals, it is unavoidable that a similar outbreak will end like the preceding one.

53. Chissa perche ci si attenda ancora a considerare la fine dell'anno al metro del 31 dicembre, piuttosto che a quello del 28 ottobre. L'attaccamento a questa consuetudine e indice di mentalita non fascista.

54. Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

55. Because we believe in the free mind we are also fighting those who, in the name of anti-Communism, would assail the community of freedom itself.

56. Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.

57. Hatten wir 10,3 Millionen Juden getotet, dann ware ich befriedigt und wurde sagen, gut, wir haben einen Feind vernichtet. ... Ich war kein normaler Befehlsempfanger, dann ware ich ein Trottel gewesen, sondern ich habe mitgedacht, ich war ein Idealist gewesen.

58. With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks.

59. Marxism emerged not only with the intention of explaining scientifically everything in the world, but in addition to this, as a representative of the 'hurt and injured' classes of the world, extpressing thus the centuries old dream of an earthly paradise. But dreams and wishes have nothing to do with science.

60. None of the Marxist concepts (literally - not a single one!) matches the logical rules of scientific concepts.

61. The firmest proof that Marxism is not science but an ideology is Marxism's attitude to the experience of the real communist (or socialist) societies.

62. Marxism disguises itself as science and owing to this it is easier for Marxism to portray the existing society as acting on the basis of scientific laws of his history, to portray the leadership's selfishness and idiocy as ingenious scientific foresight etc.

63. Unlike science, an ideology is constructed of conventional ambigous expressions, which require interpretation. It is impossible to verify or experimentally confirm an ideological statement, one cannot refute these for they are meaningless. [:] While arising, an ideology may have pretensions to be scientific. But having become an ideology, it loses all the major characteristics of science.

64. She is well known as an ardent supporter of whatever the party's main direction is. She used to be a passionate Brezhnevist. Now she is an even more passionate Gorbachevist.

65. Gorbachevism, carried out by mediocre but ambitious party bureaucrats, is an attempt not only to outdo the people but also the objective laws of human society.

66. As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways.

67. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

68. Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with others.

69. Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

70. Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations - and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of those positions to get taken seriously for their party's nomination.

71. My objection to Liberalism is this-that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind-namely, politics-of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.

72. What is the question now placed before society with the glib assurance which to me is most astonishing? That question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence those new fangled theories.

73. Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for Antiquity, it offers no redress for the Present, and makes no preparation for the Future.

74. 'I'm a non-smoker. I'm pro-life. I'm a pro-life non-smoker.' Let the party begin.

75. Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake.

76. 'A true, a genuine, National-Socialist does not go around 'hating' people of other races just as National-Socialists are not disrespectful of the customs, the religion, the way of life, of people of other races. As I have said and written many times, we National-Socialists respect other cultures, and people of other races, because we uphold honour. Honour means being civilized; it means having manners: being polite; restrained in public and so on. Honour means treating people with courtesy and respect, regardless of their race and culture. We National-Socialists express the view that a person should be proud of their own culture and heritage, respectful of their ancestors and their ancestral way of life, and accept that other peoples have a right to be proud of their own culture and heritage as well. The ideal is a working toward mutual understanding and respect.'

77. As to killing rulers, it depends entirely on the position of the ruler. If it is the Russian tsar, I most certainly believe in dispatching him to where he belongs. If the ruler is as ineffectual as an American president, it is hardly worth the effort. There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry - the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth. (p. 207)

78. He had utter disdain for the Nazis and had no time for their racial purity agenda.

79. Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

80. The hope in the hearts of millions of national socialists can be fulfilled only by an authoritarian government.

81. We 'conserve' nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means 'liberal'; we do not work for 'progress'; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about 'equal rights,' 'a free society,' 'no more masters and no servants' has no allure for us.

82. What is bad? But I have said this already: all that comes of weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.

83. I'm conservative, but I'm not a nut about it.

84. He [Muller] was an archetypal middle-rank official: of limited imagination, non-political, non-ideological, his only fanaticism lay in an inner drive to perfection in his profession and in his duty to the state - which in his mind were one... A smallish man with piercing eyes and thin lips, he was an able organizer, utterly ruthless, a man who lived for his work.

85. If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America - and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six - is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.

86. Foreign Policy is not missionary work.

87. Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public. (Preface to 2nd edition, B xxxiv)

88. You cannot have humane Zionism, it is a contradiction in terms.

89. They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained.

90. Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul - religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient.

91. Comfort and habits let us be ready to forego, but I am not ready for a creed which does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of daily life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction and international strife. How can I admire a policy which finds a characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every family and group at home, and to stir up trouble abroad?

92. Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.

93. Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless so as to have shoulders on which to stand.

94. Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down - they are truly down.

95. Eventually the old ideas will no longer serve, the old ideological framework can no longer be tinkered up to bear the weight of the facts, and a radical reconstruction becomes necessary, leading eventually to the emergence of a quite new organisation of thought and belief, just as the emergence of new types of bodily organization was necessary to achieve biological advance. Such major organizations of thought may be necessary in science as much as in religion. The classical example, of course, was the re-patterning of cosmological thought which demoted the earth from its central position and led to the replacement of the geocentric pattern of thought by a heliocentric one. I believe that an equally drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern.

96. If Hitler had not thrown the Communists into camps in 1933 there would have been civil war and bloodshed. The Communists would have revolted against the legally elected government. The greatest danger of civil war in Germany came in 1932 when it was clearly a choice between Communism and National Socialism. So Paul von Hindenburg and the other conservative bourgeois elements chose Hitler. So did I, and I would do it again if a choice between Communism and Nazism arose.

97. The Fuhrer has nominated me as his successor. In full consciousness of my responsibilities I therefore assume the leadership of the German people at this fateful hour. My first task is to save German men and women from destruction by the advancing Bolshevist enemy. It is to serve this purpose alone that the military struggle continues. For as long as the British and the Americans continue to impede the accomplishments of this task, we must also continue to fight and defend ourselves against them. The British and the Americans in that case will not be fighting in the interests of their own peoples, but solely for the expansion of Bolshevism in Europe.

98. Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

99. The Polish Communists are just like radishes. They are only red on the outside'

100. You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it anymore. A scheme is not a vision and you never have been tempted by a demon or a god.