Morris Berman Quotes

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

Dogma is less useful than cow dung. One can make whatever one likes out of it …

Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate.

If you cannot be open-minded, then you do not possess your ideas, your ideas possess you.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

I don't believe in any kind of fundamentalism.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess commitment to some special or constricting idea.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

… some parties think that only the rules laid down by their doctrines are the right ones.

We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian. The rest of the world are amiable nonentities.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth inthe fairgrounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the Liberals.

Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one's mind. You see it a lot with T.V. preachers (many have minds made of cabbage) but it can also happen with political ideology. When you're young it's easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you're a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you're doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you're gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very, very careful of this ideology. It's a big danger.

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished. No reality fits ideology.

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

An ideology can be defined as a group of beliefs that individuals borrow; most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group ... with a body of sacred documents and heroes.

For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

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