Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
The ideologue does not perform miracles. Very fittingly he confines himself to the deceptive charm of the realized abstraction.
An ideologue - one who thinks ideologically - can't lose. He can't lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and not subject to the facts.
I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man
He's suffering from Politicians' Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.
Mere analysis, that is the Party line, was … substituted for the raw, emergent movement of life itself. The psychology of human beings was descended not directly from experience but from a set of political theories.
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces.
Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it.
Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.
An ideologue believes that what is right will work. A pragmatist believes that what works is right.
Only an ideologue deals with the world as he would wish it to be, as opposed to the world as it is.
Logic, sometimes has very little to do with political action.
We can't live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed.
The more ideological, the politician, the greater his need for illusion
