Quotes About Contentiousness

In politics, we must not escape a single master…but many masters…contentiousness, love of glory, the desire to be first and greatest, and the sickness that produces envy, jealousy, and dissension in abundance.

White Americans cannot deny their long history of abusive transactions with people of color. These offenses, it should be noted out of fairness, can be explained in part by the fact that no other sizable national state has ever been formed from the confluence of so many diverse ethnic streams. All our heterogeneous ferment no doubt made contentiousness inevitable.

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious.

Yielding to His authority and affections makes no small difference in our judgment (1 Corinthians 2:12-16). When we look through spiritual eyes, we can see fruit for what it is—we can distinguish between pride and confidence, between self-abasement and humility, between contentiousness and healthy confrontation.

But the sluggishness of the economy widened the gulf between grand expectations and the real limits of progress, undercutting the all-important sense that the country had the means to do almost anything, and exacerbating the contentiousness that had been rending American society since the late 1960s. This was the final irony of the exciting and extraordinarily expectant thirty years following World War II.