You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Mere analysis, that is the Party line, was … substituted for the raw, emergent movement of life itself. The psychology of human beings was descended not directly from experience but from a set of political theories.
What's the difference between a liberal and a conservative? A liberal will interpret the constitution, a conservative will quote it!
People do not only live on interests; they also live on beliefs, especially in very ideological areas. Unless you understand the ideological aspect of the region, you cannot understand what is happening.
Yeah, but in the end his followers take what they want from his philosophy. Maybe it doesn't matter what's going on in David Icke's mind. It's how other people take him.
Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.
What's interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of misogynistic claim that misses the point.
Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.
Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
The president can talk at a very high level of abstraction that is sometimes misinterpreted when it is applied in concrete situations.
The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.
Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.
What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?
The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.
