Doctrinaire Quotes

#1. Each successive Labour Government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain.

Roy Jenkins

#2. I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

Christopher Koch

#3. Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

Pierre Trudeau

#4. Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.

Eric Hoffer

#5. It's funny; people get so doctrinaire about music. It should be the last thing you don't have an open mind about.

Randy Newman

#6. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

Robert H. Jackson

#7. At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

Carl Sagan

#8. A doctrinaire is a fool but an honest man.

Lord Melbourne

#9. Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

James D. Watson

#10. The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

James F. Cooper

#11. There is no right way to go on an edible journey. You can never tell what is going to be great, so you have to try everything. If you become doctrinaire about sticking to lowbrow foods or epicurean delights, your just being an extremist, and it won't do you any good.

Adam Richman

#12. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.

Carroll Quigley

#13. If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

Cynthia Ozick

#14. I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually.

Angela Carter

#15. So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.

Walter Lippmann

#16. When the American people look at the political process play out, they hear all the spinning and all the doctrinaire language, and they still walk away with the belief that they're not being represented in Congress, that there's no trust in the executive branch.

David Gregory

#17. I very much dislike doctrinaire liberals - they want to own your minds. And I don't like reactionary conservatives. I like to face issues in terms of conditions and not in terms of someone's inborn political philosophy.

Carl Albert

#18. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

Christopher Hitchens

#19. Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism , Christianity , and Islam , and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism . For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#20. The safety of our country demands an end to the doctrinaire, ineffective policies that currently grip Washington. Enough is enough! A safe America - a just America - that's what we want, that's what we need.

Wesley Clark

#21. I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.

Richard Dawkins

#22. America is not doctrinaire. It's hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.

P. J. O'Rourke

#23. Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.

Eugene Jarecki

#24. As a storyteller, I appreciate a great tale. As a cat lover, I appreciate a great tail.

Jarod Kintz

#25. In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen, it is essential that it should be public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, and determined by the law.

Cesare Beccaria

#26. What's the difference?" I asked him. "Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?"
"One is a choice, and one is not.

Tarryn Fisher

#27. I tend to name albums after one of the songs.

Dan Auerbach

#28. Obama said they've had some glitches with the Affordable Care website. I'll tell you something. If you order a pair of pants online and they send you the wrong color, that's a glitch. This is like a Carnival cruise, for God's sake!

David Letterman