Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

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

A liberal is a man who is right most of the time, but he's right too soon.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

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.

I don't believe in any kind of fundamentalism.

You do not have to be a wastrel to be a liberal.

There are certain catchwords which have a marvelous charm to calm the breast political, a magic power to levitate the mind captivated by them, out of the regions of mere argument and recognition of facts. Such a hold do these words and the deified abstractions they cover have on the average man of the nineteenth century, that they and they alone are worshipped as the ultimate manifestation of goodness, beauty, and truth. To be opposed to these abstractions is to be condemned as blasphemous against the first principles of rectitude, moral and political.

If you give me enough questions honestly answered, I can get you to the hollow core of any liberal position.

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.

Doing well is a conservative idea; meaning well is a liberal idea

The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know they are dogmas.

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outre.

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side

The more people figure this [liberalism a special kind of stupid] out, the more people that see it and are turned off by it, the more people who find it objectionable, the more people who ask, "Gee, what kind of people," the better off we're gonna be.

I guess libertarianism is always considered so weird and fringe that people assume that you're in the closet if you don't go around talking about it.

If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.

I'm talking about just as an ongoing, everyday matter of daily life, one of the most destructive things if not the most is radical liberalism, leftism. And it is clear that they are making great strides in corrupting once-great institutions and once-great traditions.

I'm very clear about what I believe.

The older I get, there doesn't seem to be anything remotely more interesting than talking about love and the lack of it and what happens when it's taken away from someone who's had it.

In the case of Michael Moore, having a deep, I'd even say passionate, understanding of other types of people in America who might be progressive thinkers without even realizing it.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

Meeting the people. I love it. Just talking with people and sharing part of their lives for just a few moments ... I get love and appreciation and I hope I give them the same.