Daniel Dennett Quotes

When ideas lead to ideology, that's a very dangerous thing. Ideology then leads to creating the image of an enemy, and it leads to the murder and massacre.

Ideological amplification happens when like minded people deliberate…they push each other to extreme points of views….The argument pool in a group of liberals will be only liberal. Likewise with conservatives, the other way…. Most of us on most issues do not have a ton of information…we might be steered away from moderation…. Political correctness is a good example of ideological amplification.

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

If you can educate Muslims about their biggest enemy, and if you can solve the problem, the ideological problem, it doesn't give an immediate result, but it's the best thing over the long term.

We must maximize our efforts to counter violent extremism, radicalization and recruitment in the United States and stop using xenophobia and ethnic stereotyping.

As long as anger, paranoia and misinformation drive our political debate, there are unhinged souls among us who will feel justified in turning to violent remedies for imagined threats.

A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.

One thing that I noticed is having met some former Taliban is even they, as children, grew up being indoctrinated. They grew up in violence. They grew up in war. They were taught to hate. They were, they grew up in very ignorant cultures where they didn't learn about the outside world.

It's always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.

There is a line in which populism can cross over into demagoguery. Demagoguery is the crossover where populism becomes a bad thing, and people make things up, and they assign responsibilities that aren't fair and justified, and scapegoat communities. And then it becomes a very bad thing.

Al Jazeera has abandoned even the semblance of a credible media outlet, and it broadcasts - both within Gaza and outside it, to the world - anti-Semitic incitement, lies, provocation, and encouragement to terrorists.

Donald Trump tests the limits of campaign speech. He makes false statements and refuses to correct them. He attacks other religions and ethnic groups, inflaming domestic tension and foreign terrorist rage.

The extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only he is on the right side.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

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.

What the fundamentalists are doing is a total negation of their own faith - encouraging and lionizing suicide bombers and killing women and children, hardly in keeping with the teachings of Prophet Mohammed.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

Terrorism is based on two major pillars: One is injustice, and the other is a certainty of attitude, the notion that their version of the story is the correct one.

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.

If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.

[Donald] Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people.He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter.

Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

Most ISIS members are irreconcilable. Once they've bitten that bug, that cultish bug, they would prefer to die. They're going to be given the opportunity, no one's going to get out alive from Iraq and Syria now. They make sure everyone's a suicide bomber now.

If you're going to fight terrorism, to me, you fight the root causes of terrorism.