philosophical doctrine Quotes

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

An ideology can be defined as a group of beliefs that individuals borrow; most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group ... with a body of sacred documents and heroes.

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members

Every dogma must have its day.

Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.

Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

Since ideology is part of the human personality, it deserves a place in the kingdom of eternal truths.

Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

The founder of every creed from Jesus Christ to Karl Marx, would be appalled to return to earth and see what has been made of that creed, not by its enemies, but by its most devoted adherents.

As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

A noble truth is a sacred creed.

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

Every thing to be true must become a religion.

And what sort of philosophical doctrine is thi - that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others.

When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about Him.

Think on this doctrine, - that reasoning beings were created for one another's sake; that to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without intending it.

Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.

The great desire of this age is for a doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that conduct may really be the consequence of belief

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.