Ideologen sind Leute, die glauben, dass die Menschheit besser sei als der Mensch.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

The Ideologues are in control, and that is a huge problem for the rest of us. It’s a problem because ideologues have no interest in the lives of actual human beings. Ideologues care only about their theories, about the bright new future they are building. Humans are just speed bumps on the way to utopia.

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.

There are two types of people in this world — those who think that there are two types of people in this world, and those who don’t.

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

Ideologies have become more powerful than humanity's real experience, faith, and the different values we live by. Some will misunderstand unity as uniformity: ‘You must be like us.’ No, it cannot be so. Nor can diversity be understood as a way of living without criteria or order. The latter lose sight of the fact that since the very creation of the world, the gift of nature, the gift of human life, the gift of so many different things that we experience and celebrate, cannot be sustained by inventing my own rules and doing things my way. These are ideological positions. When an ideology becomes, so to speak, the master of my life, then I can no longer dialogue with another person because I have already decided how things will be. Therefore, I am closed to encounter and transformation cannot take place. And this can happen anywhere in the world, on any subject. This obviously makes it very difficult to be Church, to be community, to be brothers and sisters.

The absurdity of modern ideological enthusiasms is evident, but while those who promote them make them the focus of their existence and the whole meaning of their lives, better-balanced people try to get on with their lives as normal. No one wants to spend his life arguing, let alone fighting, against sheer idiocy, and thus, sheer idiocy wins the day.

Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”8 And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since. Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of their genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything.12 And what’s more, identical twins r

There are no innocuous ideologies. They're forms of pathological over simplification and they're also clubs, I mean the kind of clubs that you hit people with as well as the kind that you belong to... the advantage (to me) of being an ideologue is that I can explain everything, I can feel morally superior, and I know who my enemies are...and you know what you're supposed to do with enemies? They're not your friends, you move against them.

My affinities would classify me as slightly to the center-right. However, I occasionally prefer a good man from the left to an idiot of the right, and there are some.

There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.

I place the organization ahead of individuals. I think two ordinary men are better than one genius. I always choose teamwork rather than individual efforts.

I’m not a particularly ideological person. There’s things, some values I feel passionately about.