Ideological Persuasion Quotes

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

I don't encourage socialists or anarchists to accept falsehoods, in particular, to see revolutionary potential where there is none.

The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun.

In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection.

The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion.

We have to sell conservatism to non-conservatives. We have to take our principles and apply them to problems and go sell them to people. We need to show that we have better ideas.

[Wave of bestselling conservative commentators] it's kind of like reading The Power Of Positive Thinking, or any other advice or how-to book. All they do is reassure people of their basic opinions, and then they can continue to act like they've always acted. I'd say it's time to move on to something else, but I don't know what it would be.

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

What the left are trying to do is to persuade millions of Americans that America itself is so unjust and illegitimate from the days of our founding that it isn't worth defending. It's that despicable. That's the objective here, and they are being aided and abetted by the fact that American history is so ill-taught.