Rusty Schweickart Quotes

For too long, actually, we have either said you're this or that.

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

In movies we tend make things black and white: you're either this, or you're that.

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon.

Political reporters and political professionals rushed to judgment against Romney because we crave clear, unambiguous story lines.

I think people have a strong desire to push me and others into some sort of political box that they can wrap their minds around.

They don't know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, 'Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning.' I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking - which has really been harmful.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

Anything that has only two choices is wrong.

If the internet has taught me anything it is that people are either heroes or they belong in the bin.

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.

I'm a very binary person in a bad way where it's like everything is either totally great or totally awful.

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day.

You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.

Never trust a journalist.

Letting journalism be from the perspective of the journalist. It's usually a no-no, and journalists are encouraged to be completely objective.

It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.

It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.