Quotes About Polarization

The thing is with these members, especially Omar and Tlaib, honestly, I feel like their hearts are filled with darkness. AOC's heart might be filled more with cotton candy and unicorns.

I get a lot of heat from the Left, which is bizarre. I get a lot of heat from the Right, too, but the vitriol is from the Left.

When a confrontation occurs, people rush toward it, to film it and stoke it, in the hope that someone on the other side will fly off the handle and do something extreme, and thereby incontrovertibly discredit his side of the argument. This river-and-shore arrangement advantages the Trump supporters: they can walk coolly past, playing the offended party, refusing to engage.

Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'

The problem in Washington is that no one is trying to work together.

The fact is that the rich are getting richer while the poor are being left behind. Women remain under-represented in boardrooms and under-engaged in the global workforce. Environmental change is leaving the poorest countries vulnerable. Voters are becoming more and more politically polarised and partisan.

From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn't see things in this horribly oversimplified way.

Today's Republican party is too beholden to factions generally.

Does politics have to be injected into everything?

Those who, for whatever combination of reasons, encourage the opposite of reformation, become the unwitting allies of the far political right. Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right.

Some of the folks on both sides might be sincere, but it does seem as if it is only the opposition that cares about the Bill of Rights most of the time.

I'm the only United States Senator in the country that I'm aware of that's had the far left up on TV and the far right up on TV against me at the same time.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

The pistachio: it's just like our politics. When the two sides are divided, that's when the nuts come out.

I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. Because face it, folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats or Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided by those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart...

How did our politics get so poisonous? … You take a little bit of [the poison] so you can hate the other, and it tastes kinda good, and you like how it feels and there's a gentle high to the condemnation. And you know you're right? Right? You know you're right.

It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..

I agree that it is not just the extremists who harbor bad thoughts or engage in bad acts, but they are usually the source of the polarization and try to keep education and communication of the main stream from moving forward.

Donald Rumsfeld. Love him or hate him, you've gotta admit: a lot of people hate him.

it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it's almost as if many are holding up signs saying, "Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I'll believe anything!" Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.

Rising intolerance for opposing viewpoints is a challenge not only on college campuses but also in our national political discourse.