Divide Quotes - page 11
The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized.
Thomas E. Mann
One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and the unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country (w:Divide & rule).
Howard Zinn
Multiculturalism as an official doctrine, complete with enforcing bureaucracies, undermines the rule of law because it seeks to divide people, formalise their cultural differences and enclose them in moral and intellectual ghettoes. As a result, as Bhiku Parekh puts it, ‘The idea of national culture makes little sense.' But the rule of law requires a common cultural understanding, not merely the means of repression to enforce a legal code. Once that basic cultural understanding is lost, all that remains is repression, effective or ineffective as the case may be, and experienced by many as alien and unjust.
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Monotheism has manufactured a number of hate-filled words - infidel, kãfir, unbeliever, munkir, mushrik, heathen, heretic, hypocrite, polytheist, pantheist, pagan - which raise unbreakable barriers between brother and brother, and which divide the one human family into a number of warring camps.
Sita Ram Goel
Only the American controlled sovereignty of IMF and World Bank are allowed, along with the strong national sovereignty of the US. Little and medium countries have been encouraged to divide themselves - occurred in former Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia, and was attempted in Northern Italy - or to dismiss their personality in favour of supranational organizations - in fact directed by the US.
Nico Perrone
The final frontier is perhaps the most difficult, but it's also the most important - and that's the frontier of the human spirit. For too long, people have allowed differences on the surface - differences of color, ethnicity, and gender - to tear apart the common bonds they share. And the human spirit suffers as a result.
Imagine a world in which we saw beyond the lines that divide us, and celebrated our differences, instead of hiding from them. Imagine a world in which we finally recognized that, fundamentally, we are all the same. And imagine if we allowed that new understanding to build relations between people and between nations.
Wesley Clark
[I]f we lose our chance now...that chance will not return either to us or to our children. The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war. ... And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.
Ramsay MacDonald
Ethical Egoism advocates that each of us divide the world into two categories of people-ourselves and all the rest-and that we regard the interests of those in the first group as more important than the interests of those in the second group. But each of us can ask, what is the difference between myself and others that justifies placing myself in this special category? Am I more intelligent? Do I enjoy my life more? Are my accomplishments greater? Do I have needs or abilities that are so different from the needs and abilities of others? What is it that makes me so special? Failing an answer, it turns out that Ethical Egoism is an arbitrary doctrine, in the same way that racism is arbitrary.
James Rachels
