---
title: Sincerity Formulated into Dogma
tags: [Quote, Conservatism]
summary: James Russell Lowell explains that passion and sincerity are not enough.
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> Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none
> sadder or more striking than this, that you may make everything
> else out of the passions of men except a political system that
> will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and
> unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.\
> ---James Russell Lowell

This quote comes from this week's reading in our Russell Kirk reading group and expresses well what Kirk means by "ideology": a political philosophy that relentlessly applies an all-too-simple but fervently held idea or slogan to the uncomfortably complex exigencies of human life.