Nick Sagan Quotes

Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies.

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.

If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.

I mean, what is racism? Racism is a projection of our own fears onto another person. What is sexism? It's our own vulnerability about our potency and masculinity projected as our need to subjugate another person, you know? Fascism, the same thing: People are trying to untidy our state, so I legislate as a way of controlling my environment.

The League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out.

National isolation breeds national neurosis.

I think one of the reasons that we like conspiracy theories is I think that we like to feel like there is a group of people who are so smart and powerful that they can pull the wool over an entire country or in fact even an entire world's eyes. That certainly makes us feel like somehow we're protected, even if it's not in our best interest.

In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissentions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.

It's a bit like the search for witches. You can always find them.

I am aware of the fragility of good political institutions. I never take them for granted. I am always attentive to the ways in which, particularly, collective ideologies of purity -- be it religious purity, racial purity, or national purity -- can go wrong.

Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast!

Those goddamn coons. They drive up and down Lake Shore Drive in front of my house. I hate them. I’m scared of them, and I think I’ll move to Switzerland where there just aren’t any.

Human evolution relies on cooperation, which is why identity politics feels so backward.

The Left not only needs a victim class, it has proven adept at inventing new victim classes as a means of exacerbating social conflict.

One night I was sick and I watched the old black and white 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' And it freaked me out.

You'd think we'd be exhausted by that rhetoric but you're still able to move people with fear and fright and lies that somebody's going to take your place, that in order for someone to rise, you have to fall.

Reality is self-defined as the mob, any mob, writes its own history, never to be contradicted by the quiet statement of truth.

I can't totally talk about why we divide, but... it's interesting because we're doing this scene today that's sort of the pinnacle of that. Two gangs fighting against each other, ultimately knowing that... ya know, it's like friends fighting friends. To me it's fun, personally.

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.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder - one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking - cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on - have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

People always fear what they don't understand, Evangeline. History proves that.

The anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.

Never follow a follower who is following someone who has fallen. Its why the whole world is falling apart.