John Avlon Quotes

I believe that the far-right and the far-left can be equally insane - but there's no question that in the first years of the Obama administration, the far-right has been far crazier. In part, this comes from parties being out of power - without the responsibility of governing to ground them, the activists and the ideologues take over.

I'm not going to be the rock star of the far right and frankly on the rock star of the far left.

In any society, there will be the whole spectrum of views. You will get the extremists on the far right and also the far left.

The political system loves the extremes, it doesn't so much show a lot love for the moderates.

People at the political extremes have an advantage over the rest of us. Only they seem to know exactly who and what is wrong with America and precisely what policies and programs should be adopted to fix it.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the middle.

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right

As a university student and activist, I was attacked from all quarters from the far right to the far left.

There will always be a certain element of extremists on either side, left or right, who no mainstream news outlet is going to satisfy.

Nothing ever stays in the middle. You always go from one extreme to the other, and politics is certainly that way.

We find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far-left and the far-right are the same exact person to us.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme"—

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

In the era of Donald Trump the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own.

Some who campaign against hate, seem to hate the Brexit party more than they love peace.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

On the far left, just as there is on the far right there is a dislike of Israel, not just a dislike, a hatred of Israel.

I listen to the far left which informs the far right. Somewhere in the middle is where we end up.

Extremists on the left tend to be just as critical of pragmatism as extremists on the right.

Well, I don't know too many governors who are flaming ideologues.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

Everybody seems to be imprisoned in their own sectarian or political affiliations. They don't seem to be able to rise above these things.

Some of the ideas that come from the fringe of the far right are just so implausible that it is hard to take those ideas seriously.