Ideological Frameworks Quotes

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

... politics of meaning

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.

The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.

I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.

History is the default methodology for thinking through the world for most people.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

I think politics is a higher build in life. You know? If you diffuse under normal, common sense of a story, you make it political. If you choose a conventional way for a story, or refuse to use the conventional way, you make it political.

Historians can no more avoid politics than the air they breathe.

The political value of a word must be measured not in terms of its linguistic coherence but in the way people use it.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Scientific thought - indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else - is just like the fashions that we wear - only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

After a point it does not matter whether ... perceptions are true or false; it is the perceptions that matter.

Two attempts have been made in the world to found social life: the one was upon religion, and the other was upon social necessity. The one was founded upon spirituality, the other upon materialism; the one upon transcendentalism, the other upon realism.

Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered.