Polarized Quotes & Sayings

Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became
urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far
more than questions of taste were involved. — Alan Hollinghurst

If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical. — Philip K. Dick

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from. — Barack Obama

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree. — Saul Alinsky

Sometimes I look at where we've come to, and how much technology and advancement there is, and I can't believe that we're not this perfectly balanced, beautiful, peaceful society. I'm shocked that we're so deeply polarized, that there are people who want progress and they feel guilty for wanting progress, because it somehow seems un-American, because being American means staying ignorant and going backward. — Rashida Jones

I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss "the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,"6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding "political correctness" becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don't like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words — Joan C. Williams

The world became more aware that America-despite being the hope of many who have the personal drive and ambition to become part of the "American dream"-is beset by serious operational challenges: a massive and growing national debt, widening social inequality, a cornucopian culture that worships materialism, a financial system given to greedy speculation, and a polarized political system — Zbigniew Brzezinski

Because our society is so polarized between homosexuals and heterosexuals, the bisexual closet has two doors. — Loraine Hutchins

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world. — Maxine Kumin

I don't think good and evil are polarized. — Sam Mendes

I'd go to conference after conference and it would essentially be the talking points. Either pro or con. It's amazing how polarized the tech conversation is. There's also this neurological fixation, the incessant wondering what the Internet's doing to our brain: "Does it make us stupid, does it make us distracted?" And then the other guys say, "No, it's making us smarter than ever, and better than ever, and more connected." And it's like, where is the economic and social context? Why is that rarely considered? — Astra Taylor

Immigration in America is a highly polarized issue and there are passionate views on both sides. — Spencer Bachus

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he
had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. — Annie Proulx

diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter. — Simon Singh

So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle. — Howard Dean

We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers. — Alan Lightman

What's the difference between sanity and madness anyway? We all play headgames with ourselves. We all have baggage. We all cope somehow. I'm not sure if I'm mad or sane. I mean, I hold my life together, I pay my bills, I raise my kids. But the world is so polarized and bizarre now that for some people, none of these these things matter if they're not wearing the right shoes or don't have the right credit score or a fancy family car. Some people think the most important things to worry about are handbags and tan lines. Meanwhile, war and crime and poverty unfold all around us, and we ignore it. In that environment, how can we even begin to talk about sanity and madness? — A.S. King

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics. — Cornel West

I find that Americans are all in the middle somewhere, except for the extreme nuts, and extreme nuts on both sides are the loudest. And that's why it feels like we are polarized. — Christopher Titus

The participants gave higher ratings to the studies that confirmed their initial point of view even when the studies on both sides had supposedly been carried out by the same method. And in the end, though everyone had read all the same studies, both those who initially supported the death penalty and those who initially opposed it reported that reading the studies had strengthened their beliefs. Rather than convincing anyone, the data polarized the group. Thus even random patterns can be interpreted as compelling evidence if they relate to our preconceived notions. The — Leonard Mlodinow

European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler. This, of course, was the shared binary logic of National Socialism and the Popular Front: Hitler called his enemies "Marxists," and Stalin called his "fascists."34 They agreed that there was no middle ground. — Timothy Snyder

I think America has always been polarized. — Alice Walker

The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve. — Fareed Zakaria

At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds. — Barack Obama

During school age, the bright, shame-based child will attempt to develop inhuman ego defenses or defending scripts, such as perfectionism, blaming, criticizing, righteousness or being judgmental. The character-disordered try to be more than human. Since being grounded in healthy shame is the permission to be human, the toxically shamed become polarized trying to be more than human or giving up and becoming less than human. — John Bradshaw

There are those who would draw a sharp line between power politics and a principled foreign policy based on values. This polarized view - you are either a realist or devoted to norms and values - may be just fine in academic debate, but it is a disaster for American foreign policy. American values are universal. — Condoleezza Rice

You have people saying two things that seem to contradict each other. One, that we live in a golden age of TV. The other, that television is dying. There's a reason for that. What we mean when we say it's dying is that it's already way past being fragmented into little chunks. Now it's being polarized into an aerosol mist. — Dan Harmon

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism. — Cass Sunstein

There aren't many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It's pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley. — Steve Jurvetson

Love is like a pair of polarized sunglasses, making every color seem more vivid, richer, warmer. Without it we stare at the world dull-eyed and flinch at the thought it might remain the same forever. — Carol Vorvain

They tend to forget that nothing in a polarized universe can exist without its opposite being present. - — Frank Herbert

Don't mistake good with easy. Sometimes the two are companions. Often they are polarized. Much like a grand marriage. — Peggy Sue Wells

I understand why so many Americans are fed up with government. The 112th Congress was almost universally derided as the worst ever. It was the most polarized body since the end of Reconstruction, according to one study, and I grew embarrassed by its partisan bickering, inactivity, and refusal to address the vital challenges facing America. — Olympia Snowe

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs. — Kathleen Norris

I consider the opportunity to bear witness to the eloquent beauty of Baikida's music a distinct honor. Baikida Carroll is polarized; poised; at a matchless point between lyricism and fire. — Julius Hemphill

The polarized world: We're all in it together vs Me and Mine and to hell with everyone else. — William Hageman

For reasons we don't have to get into, climate change has become an incredibly polarized issue in the United States. I think that is sad. My own personal view is that we're in a planetary emergency such has not been seen in 600,000 years. — Marshall Herskovitz

Then, too, I am constantly confronted by students, some of whom have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and who seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although the world is no longer in their vocabulary). Other students suspect that not even the entire collection of machines and instruments at MIT can significantly give meaning to their lives. They sense the presence of a dilemma in an education polarized around science and technology, an education that implicitly claims to open a privileges access-path to fact, but that cannot tell them how to decide what to count as fact. Even while they recognize the genuine importance of learning their craft, they rebel at working on projects that appear to address themselves neither to answering interesting questions of fact nor to solving problems in theory. — Joseph Weizenbaum

I've come to think that one reason for the oppressive predictability of polemical essays can be found in today's polarized social and political climate. To paraphrase Emerson: "If I know your party, I anticipate your argument." Not merely about politics but about everything. Clearly this acrimonious state of affairs is not conducive to writing essays that display independent thought and complex perspectives. Most of us open magazines, newspapers, and websites knowing precisely what to expect. Many readers apparently enjoy being members of the choir. In our rancorously partisan environment, conclusions don't follow from premises and evidence but precede them. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

The summary of Lambert and Lillenfelt's "Bloodstains" in Scientific American Mind in the October 12, 2007 The Informed Reader passes along many of these authors' strong opinions on complex and controversial topics without informing the readership that the authors' perspective is extreme, polarized, and vulnerable to challenge at many crucial points.
It is clear that false memories can be implanted in about 25% of subjects, when those memories concern issues in the normal and expectable range of experience. However, about 75% of subjects resist such efforts, and efforts to implant memories of abuse or offensive medical procedures are almost universally rejected. Therefore a wholesale attack against therapies that explore patients' memories is unwarranted. "Recovered Memory Therapy" is not a school of treatment. It is a slur used to mischaracterize approaches offensive to the authors' perspectives, designed to evoke an emotional bias against those to whom the slur is applied. — Richard P. Kluft

As a result, we create our own camps, attend only our own gatherings and conferences; soon enough, we're talking only to those who agree with us. Dialogue within the ummah disappears, our differences become only more polarized and our views become more extreme. — Yasmin Mogahed

There is such a polarized discussion of economics among people like analysts, columnists, bloggers; often, they end up just saying that views other than their own should not even be discussed. I find that frustrating. There is no intellectual progress without considering lots and lots of different views. — Adam Davidson

So many people operate in a world of right and wrong [that] they become polarized. You're conservative or you're liberal; and if you're one or the other, you can't be both. I just think that this idea of right and wrong is kind of a damaging idea. — Robert Kiyosaki

I think a lot of the most interesting work in art and in films are often kind of polarized opinions and affect people in very different ways, which may be less successful commercially, but they elicit a dialogue that's quite interesting. — Lily Cole

This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, elites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change. — George Packer

My bisexuality is part of the expression of the flexibility, the changeability of my spirit that feels essential and precious to the center of my life. My bisexuality is a part of my desire to remain an outsider, to be able to "pass" into polarized worlds, to abandon expectation, to honor the mystery of being. My bisexuality is a celebration of the ever-opening flesh, the expansive, fluid mirror of social discourse. — Michelle T. Clinton

Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public. — Ron Fournier

From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers. — Nancy Mairs

About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sudden glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean. — Edgar Allan Poe

The two parties are still more polarized than ever before and the rise of partisan media is an important reason for it. — John Avlon

If one has to be right, then one has to be wrong, in a polarized world. Yes and no. But between yes and no there is an infinite range of possibilities, a full spectrum of maybe. If you are stuck in either/or, then you are missing the infinite." ~Gi — Brandon W. Jones

A concrete agenda and landslide victory might not even guarantee a president his mandate in a capital as polarized as Washington. — Ron Fournier

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. As a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions (16). — Anthony Everitt

In a time of polarized politics there's one thing that more than ninety percent of Americans agree on, that our government is broken, and broken because of the money in politics. — Lawrence Lessig

The world is polarized. The middle class becomes smaller. The polarization makes the difference between rich and the poor big. This is true. — Pope Francis

[Barack] Obama has a grasp of language and the presentation of language, particularly in times of crisis. And he did this over the race issue. He did this early on in his administration, when the country was polarized. That was unprecedented. — Frank Luntz

Redistricting and a broken, polarized Congress have made it tough to be a moderate in Congress. — Mike Ross

The debate on climate change and global warming has been intensely polarized. A great deal of this 'noise' has clouded the very real and emerging issues that we as an industry and society need to address. — Johnny Chan

Society, because it is composed of living humans, is organic and if healthy, supple. It is like a rubber band. As long as the groups that compose society are flexible and social and emotionally supporting, it serves its constituency well. It bends, weaves, twists, turns, and envelops everyone in diverse manners. If opposing forces become too locked into their polarized viewpoints, though, other things happen.

Like two grumpy siblings, they hold their views with anger or self-righteousness and utter vulgar and crass words, but it amounts to the same thing. The two groups pull on the rubber band and rigidly hold to their position without empathy.

The rubber band (society) grows taut and then eventually it snaps and collateral damage ensues and the proverbial baby is thrown out with the bath water. — Leviak B. Kelly

I want us to see a resurgence, a revival, a renaissance of so many of the wonderful attributes and values that Africa has. You know we have had a jurisprudence, a penology in Africa which is not retributive. We've had a jurisprudence which was restorative. When people quarreled in the traditional setting, the main intention was not to punish the miscreant but to restore good relations. For Africa is concerned, or was concerned, about relationship, about the wholeness of relationship. That is something we can bring to the world, a world that is polarized, a world that is fragmented, a world that destroys people. — Desmond Tutu

Particular rootlessness of the society had always lent itself to powerful extremes of both the left and the right, there was, in the volatility and evanescence of the culture an atmosphere ripe for extremism, each side with its own Utopian dreams, each side driving the other to a more polarized position. — David Halberstam

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. — N. T. Wright

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do. — David Brooks

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right. — Ian McEwan

The more polarized the gender roles, the more violent the society. The less polarized the gender roles, the more peaceful the society. — Gloria Steinem

As polarized as we have been, we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country. — Pat Buchanan

Affluence isn't affluence at all. Hong Kong is the benchmark; everybody else's affluence is mere tat. Until you've experienced that perfume-washed air as polarized glass doors embrace you into a luxury hotel's plush interior, you've only had a dud replica of the real thing. — Jonathan Gash

A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection. — James Wolcott

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

Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries. — Jane Goodall

When the contrary magnetic poles were on the same side, there was an effect produced on the polarized ray, and thus magnetic force and light were proved to have relation to each other ... — Michael Faraday

What I love is getting polarized opinions. — Brendon Urie

But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything
including "my" thoughts and actions
were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites. — Alan W. Watts

In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized. — Ivan Illich

However, candidates and elected officials pay disproportionate attention to the views of the politically engaged segment of the public, which is also the most ideologically polarized segment of the public. Therefore, polarization at the elite level is largely a reflection of polarization among the politically engaged segment of the American public. — Alan I. Abramowitz

America is militarily overstretched, politically polarized and financially indebted. — Ivan Krastev

As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument. There is no room for doubt and little time — A.O. Scott

The argument culture urges us to approach the world - and the people in it - in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as 'both sides'; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize. — Deborah Tannen

Economist Peter Orszag witnessed the workings of vetocracy and its nefarious consequences. Writing in 2011, he reflected on what he had just witnessed as one of the top economic policymakers in the United States: "During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country's political polarization was growing worse - harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. . . . Radical as it sounds we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic. I know that such ideas carry risk. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: they come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way out of it. — Moises Naim

We're trying to build a platform utilizing the Internet that allows the good American people to speak out about their frustration about the polarized country that we live in politically. — Hamilton Jordan

Then something fails and they're all out again, but DVD revenue is disappearing, you know, it's not disappearing but it's going off a cliff and what that's done is it's polarized the industry in a way that I've never seen before where studios are making less, they're bifurcating their choices where they're either going very, very big or they're just picking up a few rights on an acquisition basis or making really small things. — Eric Fellner

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization. — George Saunders

America is polarized and divided beyond repair unless we renew our conviction that the health of our nation comes first. That we concentrate on repairing not only our stressed infrastructure, but also our people. Free or reasonably priced education beyond secondary school is more than a political issue; it is the primary solution to our nation's long term problems." Captain Hank Bracker — Hank Bracker

I found that in such a small, polarized society, taking sides meant you were actively rejecting others, animating opposition. — Thelma Adams

People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking ... '1861, that was polarized.' — P. J. O'Rourke

It appears that the picture of DID as the ongoing clash of polarized personality types (e.g., good girl-bad girl, upright citizen-sociopath) is hard to sustain, although such clashes, when they occur, arrest attention and at times become a concern of the forensic psychiatrist. Most patients have personalities that are named, but there may be those who are nameless or whose appellations are not proper names (i.e.. "the slut," "rage," etc.).
Child personalities, those who retain long periods of continuous awareness, those who claim to know about all of the others, and depressed personalities are the most frequent types enumerated (Putnam et al.. 1986). — Richard P. Kluft

What I would like to be remembered for is that Walter Washington changed the spirit of the people of this city, that he came in as mayor when there was hate and greed and misunderstanding among our people and the races were polarized. — Walter Washington

We live in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies and paradoxes: light vs. dark and good vs. evil. We as Mexic Amerindians/mestizas are the dark. We are the evilor at least, the questionable. — Ana Castillo