Quotes about Polarization

Whenever communities, families, nations, churches are divided, we sniff out the diabolic.

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.

Outrage has no time for dialogue, and it won't be distracted by nuance or even truth.

Those who take the extreme positions in American political and economic life are always wrong.

The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me, male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on. The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom. It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is usually not much room for a "reconciling third." I see this in myself almost every day.

The Democratic Party is evil.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.