Jacob Weisberg Quotes

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

Libertarians believe that any government interference is bad. Anyone with a brain knows that climate change needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for their philosophy. Their ideology is so strongly held that, remarkably, it's overcoming the facts.

It is in the uncomprisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma that the danger lies.

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

… 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.

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

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

I read all of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 17.

A mistake made by many people with great convictions is that they will let nothing stand in the way of their views, not even kindness.

I don't believe in any kind of fundamentalism.

I believe that dogma is often evil.

I'm not sure if President Obama is an ideologue or a pragmatist. I am hoping and praying he's a pragmatist.

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.

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.

If you have ideology, you are less tolerant of the variant point of view.

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.

We have got to be open. We cannot be a single-issue party or a single-philosophy party.” …. I am concerned about the undercurrent of rigid conservatism where you don’t dare not toe the line.

If any expert or scientist reaches a conclusion or espouses a view that departs from the ideologue’s world view, it is the expert that he examines carefully and not his ideology.

Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.

A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.

It has been said that I am not a 'real' Libertarian. A certain faction of the Party has come to believe that the writings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman are the holy texts of Libertarianism, and I disagree. I believe that the Libertarian movement is and should be more encompassing than the narrow-minded advocacy of economic anarchy.

I took inspiration from 'Fountainhead,' the way in which Ayn Rand conveyed her political philosophy through an immensely popular novel.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

My contact with [Cato] was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.

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