Ideological Commitment Quotes

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party

It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

When I was a young man, my mother said to me, 'You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist.' So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

When I consider what it was that moved me to join the Communist Party, I have to cast my mind back for more than a quarter of a century to try and ascertain what precisely my motives at that time were.

I am a Communist. My painting is Communist painting.

I don’t have an ideology.

They are fuelled by an ideology that itself is non-negotiable and forms a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other.

The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are

That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I'd find inconsistencies.

Anyone leaving the Congress' camp and joining - or even indirectly praising - the BJP-led NDA coalition immediately stands the risk of losing this Congress-issued certificate of secularism. It is a travesty!

We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right... And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.

I joined the Communist Party because I felt I had to be in some organization.

Very curious, at the age of about 13 years, Oswald began to study Marxism and he kept on in his writing, affirming that he was a Marxist. Probably he did want to show himself as a great, supreme Marxist.

Comrade Mao, whether he was crossing 'a sea of surging waves' or scaling 'a mountain pass impregnable as iron' always held unwaveringly to his course, setting a shining example for the Chinese Communist Party.

Weak natures have to be told that it simply means "to be [with the Nazi Party] or not to be [at all].

I am a liberal. I have always been a liberal.

Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

I'm a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal 'til the day I die.

I'm a political detainee and will be a political prisoner …. I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I've always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison.

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

You can't just be a revolutionary for 40 or 50 years. That means compromising.