“Within our ideological system, it is impossible to perceive that anyone might criticize anything but "mistakes"”

— Noam Chomsky

Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1992
Context: I never criticized United States planners for mistakes in Vietnam. True, they made some mistakes, but my criticism was always aimed at what they aimed to do and largely achieved. The Russians doubtless made mistakes in Afghanistan, but my condemnation of their aggression and atrocities never mentioned those mistakes, which are irrelevant to the matter -- though not for the commissars. Within our ideological system, it is impossible to perceive that anyone might criticize anything but "mistakes" (I suspect that totalitarian Russia was more open in that regard).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Within our ideological system, it is impossible to perceive that anyone might criticize anything but "mistakes"" by Noam Chomsky?

Noam Chomsky photo

Noam Chomsky 334

american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928

Related quotes

“The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

“It is impossible to do anything for anyone.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Source: All Men are Mortal (1946), p. 317

“It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it the finger of that Almighty Hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the Revolution.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

As quoted in The Federalist https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101037492095;seq=202;skin=mobile (Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner, 1818), p. 194, James Madison, Federalist #37.
1770s

“…we no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in our arts, humanities or anything else; instead we have slogans and ideologies. An ideology is a religious or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“What channels the energy of our total being to produce anything that might be within the boundaries of possibility is known as will.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Source: The Eagle's Gift, (1981)

Albert Einstein quote: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant: A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

“Know that the essence of a person, as such, is quite impossible to perceive without his material embodiment (…) This is because our five senses and our imagination do not offer us anything more than the revelation of the actions of the essence, but not the essence itself.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Form, Essence & Matter

“If government, or those in positions of power and authority, can silence criticism by the argument that such criticism might be misunderstood somewhere, there is an end to all criticism, and perhaps an end to our kind of political system. For men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

"The Problem of Dissent" in Saturday Review, Volume 48 (December 1965), p. 81; also read into the US Congressional Record (26 June 1969)

“The criticism of ideology must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the Jew is just an embodiment of a certain blockage - of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogenous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the Jew is a point at which social negativity as such assumes another formula of the basic procedure of the criticism of ideology, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it projects this internal negativity into the figure of the Jew. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporalist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the Jew.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Capitalism is an exploitative system, as Marx has argued so cogently, and as anyone who studies the inequalities within and between the countries of the world today must see. It is therefore a priori likely that its ideology conceals realities that if known would make the exploited militant.”

Andrew Collier (philosopher) (1944–2014) British philosopher

Source: "The Masters of Suspicion", p. 85

Related topics