Rebecca Harding Davis Quotes

Tribalism is the most powerful force in the world.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

Religion is often just tribalism: pride in a group one was born into, a group that is often believed to have 'God' on its side.

I think I'm becoming a psychologist in explaining the Republican Party. It's the only way you can explain 'em. It's psychological.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Politicians are trapped in their own views.

Though I am probably guilty of indulging in excessive tribalism myself at times, I try to put partisanship to one side where appropriate.

In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.

[Democrat Party] believe that there's gonna be mass appreciation and love and everybody's gonna be getting along.

Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.

Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side

The Republican Party is the party of national security. There's hardly a national security wing of the Democratic Party anymore. So if we turn away from it, that'll be a big problem.

There are dangers in consensus: it could be an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything. ... No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do.

The idea that Hispanics or women or any other group of people think alike, vote alike? That's what Democrats want. They want mind-numbed robots who all think alike and who all vote alike. It's easy! You dumb them down, you get rid of critical thinking, and you just have a blob, basically, out there of people that look for the D on the ballot and pull the lever.

The Republican party is the party of nostalgia. It seeks to return America to a simpler, more innocent and moral past that never actually existed. The Democrats are utopians. They seek to create an America so fair and non-judgmental that life becomes an unbearable series of apologies. Together, the two parties function like giant down comforters, allowing a candidate to disappear into the enveloping softness, protecting them from exposure to the harsh weather of independent thought.

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

I agree with George Washington's concern about parties: They become an end in themselves, rather than being committed to helping people improve their lives.

I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity.

Our opinions partake, more or less, of the prejudices of our class, party, or sect. We are all largely pledged, through interest, affection, or passion, to particular classes of opinion, and the strength of efforts to get released from these pledges, is the measure of our advancement.

Our political parties exist for no other reason than to win power; they are not ideological debating societies designed to present a particular political philosophy and to persuade voters to accept it.

Nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.

We have a two-party system: The Democratic Party, which is a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, which is a party of bad ideas.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.