35 Quotes About Polarization

There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.

Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.

The author observers that better technology actually increased division because rival outlets funded by rival parties could get their slant to the partisans

Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.

When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.

Feminism is still a subject which provokes passion and, it has to be said, unreason. 'Are you for it or against it?' is the most question. But such polarization is now unhelpful, obscuring an understanding of what feminism has achieved, what has changed, and what role gender now actually does play.

...when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them.

The 1970s, fewer than 25% of US residents lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by landslide. 30 years later, that percentage has nearly doubled.