ISMS Quotes
To those privileged ones -- among whom we count ourselves -- the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail.
Savitri Devi
I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.
Thomas Carlyle
Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.
Roger Ebert
America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government - and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.
Winston Churchill
the art-critic has provided the products of my lab with a (new) label: 'abracadabra'.... [but] one can not speak about abracadabra-ism, and that is its advantage on all –isms: it doesn't know time and limits and especially not the 'periods of time' [but] only seasons.... all -isms are dead, blown away, sprayed in the air, gone (here imagery does not fit, imagery is always wrong) - only for the 'abracadabra' is the future wall, the coming wall in the next house - how much the 'peinture' of other fabrics is curving and folding itself, polished or blown-up, it's all for nothing... We are not addressing those offspring but only the artists in this world..
Hendrik Werkman
The production of wealth by private enterprise is called Capitalism. It is hard to call Capitalism one of the isms, because Capitalism is not a creed at all. Capitalism was not ‘invented' by any sociologist or philosopher. Capitalists never called themselves that. The word was invented by socialists to describe what they hated.
Dorothy Thompson
Awareness and children - Awareness will be respected in the home and in the school as a sacred, God given gift. Awareness is the mother of creation. Awareness can never be divided, nor imposed. Textbooks cannot describe it, because there is no beginning nor end to it. Awareness can only be experienced. To inspire a very young child to look for God is undivine, because in this way you create isms. Awareness is a seed in all creation and in every individual. If you allow the child to have his natural growth, you will allow his awareness to grow; the child will enjoy normal life and will not be dogmatic. In awareness you do not possess children, yet they come closer to you. Even now, children as young as nine or 10 are raising funds to feed the hungry. Imagine what they will be like when they are tomorrow's citizens. Children can do it. Politicians cannot do it.
Benjamin Creme
I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this, outside this campus - and even inside it - idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference.
Bono
He who states that markets cannot fail, that market failure is always the result of government intervention, is a dogmatist. How the hell would he know? Overall, Hayek was not a dogmatist, although in his writings there can be found traces of such a liberal utopianism. There we encounter the motto: "What is not supposed to be, must not be! And what must not be, is not!" To me, all isms are suspicious anyway. The sceptic in me asks: why should markets be more reasonable than other human institutions? And we can see it every day: markets are also imperfect, prone to error, and in need of repair, like everything else that man has created.
Friedrich Hayek
For all their focusing on the all-purpose bogey of Hindu nationalism (or worse isms), it is remarkable that Indian Marxists and their Western disciples have completely failed to study this ideology. During my Ph.D. research on this very topic, I found that practically all secondary publications in the field, including some influential ones, dispensed almost completely with the reading of primary sources. Typically, a few embarrassing quotations, selected by Indian critics of Hindutva from some old pamphlets (mostly Golwalkar 1939), are repeated endlessly and in unabashedly polemical fashion.
Koenraad Elst
Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. When all today's isms have become yesterday's ancient philosophy, there will still be reactionaries and there will still be revolutionaries. No amount of rationalization can avoid the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on the planet. I still believe in the fundamental injustice of the profit system and do not accept the proposition there will be rich and poor for all eternity.
Abbie Hoffman
Spinozism is a last-ditch salvationist movement, aimed at redeeming the status of isms. It stands for ‘ismhood', a necessarily total secular faith fusing conceptual satisfaction and moral-political guidance. The aim is redemption, guaranteeing the future of the intelligentsia in this postmodern, and post-everything sense. Entrancing the globe by multitude-speak, the role of intellectuals is to fuse the coat of many colours into a consummate internationalism. And what can the warp and woof of this fabric be, but politically correct love?
Baruch Spinoza
