History is written by the victors.
Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Of course, my own political beliefs inform the ideas I come up with.
To frame an issue is to reduce it to a story for which there is only one possible outcome
If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neither of those two things are true and it doesn't take a lot brains to understand this.
The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.
The interesting thing for me is, if that had been a left-wing person raising questions, [President Obama] probably would have expressed his anger. Because Obama really does get upset about progressives.
Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.
Liberals are constantly wrong. In fact, that's how you rise to the top in liberalism, by being wrong. If you are wrong, and if you are consistently wrong, it's even better. You're really one of them if you're really wrong all the time. Look at Jimmy Carter.
The right belief is like a good cloak, I think. If it fits you well, it keeps you warm and safe. The wrong fit however, can suffocate.
[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.
I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.
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.
Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.
Clients say, 'What's your strategy,' and I say, 'Ask me what I believe first.' That's a far more enduring answer.
For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
Since ideology is part of the human personality, it deserves a place in the kingdom of eternal truths.
My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a relative good... I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx - though this undoubtedly will be suggested - but from Fichte and Hegel.
For liberals, supposedly good intentions always trump results.
My political sentiments inclined toward the left and emphasized the socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.
Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.
Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
