Ideological Resistance Quotes

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fat is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas—but sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

...by crushing individuals, they cannot kill ideas.

If religious liberty is protected, religious leaders and other men and women of faith will be able to speak out on social issues. People with deep religious convictions may be less likely to succumb to dominating ideologies or trends, and more likely to act in accordance with what they see as true and right. Civil society can count on them as engines of reform.

The problem is, most people don't like to hear suggestions that directly confront or run counter to their most sacred beliefs.

Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy men control the economy and dominate society. This idea repels most Americans.

How do you fight an idea—especially a new idea?

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

The sources of Islamism's strength include the fact that it is a response to the oppression of the Third World as a whole.

I'm tired of the ayatollahs of the right wing. We're fighting for freedom in Iraq. We're going to fight for freedom in America.

I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.

People who don't accept that doctrinal system, they may try to survive in the media, but they are unlikely to.

In the long term, to defeat this ideology [terrorism] - and they [terrorists] are bound by an ideology - you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.

The family is the human race's natural defense against utopianism.

The agricultural working people should be imbued with a thoroughgoing faith in socialism and steadfast anti-imperialist and class consciousness so that they can regard our style of socialism as their life and soul, love it ardently, and fight staunchly against the imperialists' moves for ideological and cultural infiltration.

... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.

Indeed, nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure, and not seldom end with the exact opposite of the desired result.

We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.

A vigorous democracy a democracy in which there are freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech would never succumb to communism or any other ism.

I cringe every time I see no evidence of push-back by the Republican Party on Obama policies.

Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men....And the best place to start is with a carbon tax.

We've tried as hard as we can into keep the ideas intact in the hail storm that is Hollywood, so, whether he is or not, I'm personally proud of what I've been able to jam down their throats.

Rome cut off the heads of Christians and they continued to reappear one way or another. Something similar happens with Marxists.

Any initiative which patently served the interests of society was immediately viewed with suspicion and even with overt hostility. Why was our system so unresponsive to renewal and innovation?