Sam Shepard Quotes

Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.

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

People are so quick to demonize and stereotype those on the other side that they often say that it's impossible to work with people on the other side.

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

Right now, politics follows the rules of talk radio - using conflict, tension, fear, and resentment to find new recruits.

The one thing we ought to worry about is the propensity of this country to overreact, and to engage in cycles of bitterness.

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.

Politics has become a little like football. We cheer for our favorite team no matter how well they are playing.

Netanyahu is no king, his government sows division and incitement.

I'm so bored of tribal politics. That's part of the problem. I'm so bored of it. I'm not a tribalist. That's not what turns me on.

Any time the country is split 50/50, the leader is wrong.

Unfortunately, our history has abundant examples of patriotism being used to hurt those who express views in disagreement with that of the majority.

Our democratic societies are in danger. In allowing ourselves to be infiltrated by fear, to be blinded by the passion of identity, we are entertaining the most serious illusions about our freedom.

You see in times of crisis that extremist forces, populist forces, have a better ground to oversimplify things and to manipulate feelings. Feelings of fear.

It is wrong to make anyone into an enemy; it is wrong to scare the people of one's own country with that enemy and try to rally some allies on that basis.

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

The popular tendency is to listen approvingly to the most extreme statements and claims of politicians and orators who seek popularity by declaring their own country right in everything and other countries wrong in everything.

At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

A democracy soon becomes a victim of its own propaganda ... Its enemy become the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue.

There are only two kinds of politics. They are not radical or reactionary, or conservative and liberal, or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust.

There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

We have seen in Washington the worst kind of partisanship, the worst kind of gridlock. There is nothing wrong with our country. There is much wrong with our politics ….

… when the one side says black and the other white, when the opposite political characters are treated by their respective antagonists as rogues, fools, blockheads, wretches, and all the other names in which the English political dictionary is so very rich, one stands like the ass, between two bundles of hay, considerably embarrassed which ought to be chosen....

I mean, you know, this idea that somebody we disagree with on economic or social policy or something we have to turn into some kind of ogre or demon, I think, is a mistake. I mean, it's like telling the American people or half the American people that don't agree with you they're all fools. That's just not true.