Yquotes.com

 

The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe.
--
"We Need a Radical Left", The Nation (29 June 1998)

 

Ellen Willis

» Ellen Willis - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

“Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. ... This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

 

Leo Strauss

 

Indeed, if there's one thing a euro politician despises and fears more than anything it's the democratic will of the people. And this is because many of those who run Europe today were politicised by sixties pseudo-Marxist utopianism, which they're still determined to impose on the people - for their own good - regardless of what the people might want. They believe in centralised state control: society as a project - their project. It's the mentality that ran the old Soviet Union, and it's the mentality that has driven the European Union forward against the wishes of the European people, imposing a constitution on the whole of Europe that hardly anyone was allowed to vote for, and imposing a single currency on the whole of Europe that's now falling apart at the seams. But they won't abandon it because they consider it a vital step on the road to full political union, and the abolition of all European nation-states under a central socialist dictatorship.

 

Pat Condell

 

History is ultimately determined by ideas, and ideas can, at least in principle, change almost instantly. But in order for ideas to change it is not sufficient for people to see that something is wrong. At least a significant number must also be intelligent enough to recognize what it is that is wrong. That is, they must understand the basic principles upon which society — human cooperation — rests ... And they must have sufficient will power to act according to this insight.

 

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

 

To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.

 

Joseph Goebbels

 

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them.
This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.

 

Lawrence Lessig