Howard Jacobson Quotes

Radical politics tend to be simple minded.

The Tea Party people are ideologues. They are right, and no one can change their minds. There is no reason for compromise.

Almost any theory, even those espoused by self-proclaimed conservatives, can be held in an absolutistic way such that it poses a threat to institutional and political stability.

There is a segment of the right that doesn't care about winning, what I call zealotry masquerading as principle.

One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts.

God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

A government must not waiver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Conservatives are always right about everything. We are. We are.

'The Sea Wolf' is the story of a man who believes only in brute force. He is so firm in belief in his own ideas that he despises all who disagree with him. He preaches the doctrine of intolerance. He flaunts the notion that democracy is anything but weakness.

I believe that dogma is often evil.

The trouble with radicals is that they read only radical literature, and the trouble with conservatives is that they don't read anything.

His major flaw may be that he is a prisoner of his own convictions…. He refuses to endorse laws with which he disagrees.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

… contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party... we say, ‘Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position...

… the most disturbing aspect of the Republican political culture is how it puts its unquenchable thirst for power, domination and a radical ideology above facts, reason and the truth.

Bernie Sanders is making a big and potentially dangerous mistake with his continuing insistence on changes to the Democratic Party's rules and platform. I should know. As chairman of Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, I understand too well where such ideological stubbornness can lead.

It seems in America you are stuck with the position you adopted, even when events change, in order to claim absolute consistency. That can't be good.

Reactionary movements can't sustain themselves unless they find something new to catch and burn on.

Sadly, in the highest levels of economic thought in government, questions are not tolerated. It is as if we're dealing with the binary thinking of a fundamentalist religion.

I'd rather sink with a bad theory than swim with muddy pragmatism.

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong.