Rigid Ideology Quotes

In a chaotic world, fundamentalism can be a moral compass.

Piety is oppressive. It takes all the air out of thought.

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.

The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.

Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.

I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill.

I don't want to be married to any ideology, because life is a lot more fluid than that, and I think that we're trained and conditioned in this country to think in teams.

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books.

Fundamentalism is such a pejorative word and immediately evokes images of angry extremism. In my experience, that's not usually what it looks like. I was a fundamentalist in high school.

The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.

The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death. And yes, I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them. The alternative to fanaticism and to death is not some miraculous realization that someone has been wrong and he has to apologize. No, the answer to fanaticism and to death is curiosity and compromise and concession.

It's easy to get tired of religious fundamentalists. They're such a bore. They have no sense of mystery. It's a drag, man.

One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.

What I've found in being around political people is they're willing to negotiate their ideology somewhere around 5 percent. They believe that's really stepping out. And it's really hard to do business when you only move 5 percent from your ideology.

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school and went to a fundamentalist church, and they were the greatest people; there was an amazing sense of community. The problem is when the messiness of real life enters, and the inflexibility of a moral code cannot cope with the realities of moral relativism.

Most people don't like to think. This is why human religions are so popular. It almost doesn't matter what the belief system is, as long as it's firm, consistent, clear in its expectation of the follower, and rigid. Given those characteristics, you can find people who believe in almost anything. It's God's way, they say. God's word. And there are those who will accept that. Gladly. Because, you see, it eliminates the need to think.

Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.

I hate to be categorized.

They [The National Rifle Association] not only punish people who do not follow their line, but they dehumanize them.

Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists.

It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy.

[Describing Margaret Thatcher:] She approaches the problems of our country with all the one-dimensional subtlety of a comic strip.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.