Jimmy Wales Quotes

Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.

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

In the field of controversy I always pity the moderate party, who stand on the open middle ground exposed to the fire of both sides.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

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

Centrism is bogus.

I am not a centrist.

There's something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

Conservatives and liberals alike have been waiting for this moment for a third of a century.

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

A wingnut is someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum - the professional partisans, the unhinged activists and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They're the people who always try to divide rather than unite us.

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.

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

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

The field of politics always presents the same struggle. There are the Right and the Left, and in the middle is the Swamp. The Swamp is made up of know-nothings, of them who are without ideas, of them who are always with the majority.

Left-wing confusion spawns right-wing reaction.

Our politics are half noble and half mud wrestling.

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.

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

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

… 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.

I don't object to polarization if it achieves an objective.