The ideology (…) serves to rationalize and to justify all irrationality and immorality that exist within a society. At the same time the ideology, containing in itself the frozen idea, as it were, satisfies the adherents of the system; they believe themselves to be in touch with the most fundamental needs of man, with love, freedom, equality, brotherliness―because they hear and say these words. And at the same time, however, the ideology also preserves these ideas. While they become rituals they nevertheless remain expressed; they can become living ideas again when the historical situation enables man to awaken and to experience again as real that which had become an idol. When the ideology ceases to be a ritual, when it becomes connected again with individual and social reality, then it is retransformed from ideology into an idea. It is as if the ideology were a seed, resting for years in sand and then transplanted into fertile ground where it grows again. An ideology, then, is at the same time a deceptive substitute for an idea and its preservation, until the time has come for its revival. ― (1961a: May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy, New York (Doubleday) 1961, pp. 124f.)
The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the name of the betrayed ideal. ― (1962a: Beyond the Chains of Illusion. My Encounter with Marx and Freud (Credo Perspectives, planned and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen), New York (Simon and Schuster) 1962, p. 134.)