Rod Dreher Quotes

Selective truth

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

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

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

In today's distorted world of 'human rights,' truth takes a back seat to ideology, and false claims - especially those that 'support' radical ideologies - persist even after they have been exposed.

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

I don't want to interview people for the purpose of developing a world view and pushing that on people.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

The Republicans love the truth, but they hate facts.

When politics comes in the door, truth goes out the window.

There's so much in the media that's not the truth.

Lying in the political sphere has gotten out of hand, and because people tend to dismiss things that challenge their preconceived notions of the world, fact checkers can only play a small part in remedying the problem.

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie.

Never had there been such an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge…. But the obverse is also true. We can have thrust upon us a false picture of reality as distorting as the trick mirrors in a Coney Island funhouse.

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

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

Once you subscribe to an ideological dogma as a solution to certain grievances, it then frames your mindset.