Ideological Representation Quotes

So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?

The man who is always waving the flag usually waives what it stands for.

Incumbents are safe, but party majorities are not. This fosters symbolic votes, message politics and little serious legislating in Congress.

Symbols can often lead to progress.

Film is carrying a lot of ideology. It's carrying an image. It's forging an image not only of the rest of the world, but also of yourself, you know.

The people we want in our news prime-time space now are strongly opinionated people who I think, for the most part, attract audiences of like-minded people, who want to know 'what's our side thinking right now?'

I think that anybody who is going to be the standard-bearer, the spokesman for the progressive movement, in the context of a presidential race, has got to learn to master the language and really get their finger on the pulse of how people are feeling. I think that's really important.

Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.

That night image had replaced the written word as the natural language of politics.

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.

What about the accusation that Hollywood is trying to advance its liberal agenda? Well, the fact is, while the creative community admittedly leans left, Hollywood has become a corporate town.

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

If I have a certain opinion, I try to incorporate that into my work.

It is the responsibility of a director to introduce their politics in their films, and whether you like it or not your politics will be reflected unless you are an opportunist which some directors are.

Every Harvard class should have one Democrat to rescue it from oblivion.

I think it's pretty classic if you look at the way entertainment reflects the country's status. There was a reason in the '50s when communism was bubbling that there were a million zombie movies. Because that is the direct allocation. So for the last two years we've been hearing, "Make America great again." People go, "Well, America was never great." What do you mean? What you mean is that they want to look back in history. And so I think it's only natural for entertainment to reflect that.

The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.

Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification.

A country, a style or an epoch are interesting only for the idea behind them.

Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

There is not a single international foreign TV channel that is doing something other than promotion of the values of the country that it is broadcasting from.

I've always been interested in the manufacturing of narratives, identities, and ideologies, and how they are embodied and negotiated by viewers.

It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.