Ideological Justification Quotes

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

The ideologue does not perform miracles. Very fittingly he confines himself to the deceptive charm of the realized abstraction.

For some reason which I have failed to understand, many people like the system [scientific totalitarianism] when it is Russian but disliked the very same system when it was German. I am compelled to think that this is due to the power of labels; these people like whatever is labelled ‘Left’ without examining whether the label has any justification.

I think - something I learned recently looking up the meaning of ideology. If you look in American encyclopedias, it says, you know, 'Rules for - basic rules for a system of economics or politics.' If you look in the Oxford, it says that, and then it says... 'Despite - and people will hold these propositions despite events.'

That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

It has been demonstrated that no system, not even the most inhuman, can continue to exist without an ideology.

Reasons are the spoils of victory. When you've destroyed the enemy, then your leaders write down the reasons in books, and give moving speeches about them. If you've done your job, then there aren't any of the enemy left to dispute your leader's reasons. At least not until the next war.

The most arbitrary powers in history always hid under the claim of some impersonal logic—God, the laws of nature, the laws of the market—and they always overlooked the backlash when morally intolerable discrepancies became glaringly visible.

Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

Despite his profound incompetence on many levels, Obama has been an adept propagandist who has blamed capitalism for problems caused and magnified by socialist remedies to justify further socialist solutions. He's now doing the same thing all over again as his new socialist solutions are failing.

For academics like Stanley, shackled to the media machine, the past is not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

Presidents, under the pressure of events, especially war, find themselves needing to articulate new and persuasive rationales for their policies—especially when great sacrifices are involved.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

General Zia-ul-Haq, a dictator and unscrupulous political actor, used Islam as a pretext for waging war in Afghanistan and adopting an aggressive stance towards India. By advancing a more orthodox version of Islam, he was able to hold on to a repressive regime and quell any opposition.