Group Conflict Quotes

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy.

The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.

The old approach of sacrificing the needs of one group to benefit another just won't work.

The saddest part of the human race is we're obsessed with this idea of 'us and them,' which is really a no-win situation, whether it's racial, cultural, religious or political.

Any great organization can go through sectarian phases.

As you get larger, it is harder to have focused discussions. Because one of the things I've learned about Congress over the past four years that I've been in is there's no shortage of opinions about how things should be done on any particular subject.

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.

Xscape never had a flop album as a group. The reason we broke up never had anything to do with sales.

There's a pattern when tours start - a pattern of infighting, of making up, of breaking up, of addiction. There's a pattern of going to jail. There's a pattern of passion for music.

If one group of people can exterminate another in the name of so-called religion, the world has no hope.

When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.

It doesn't always turn out. It's not always a happy ending when sometimes you say things that you think, and it goes against the grain of the larger group.

The mission of parties is to keep the people divided into factions, that they may be unable to do anything for themselves.

There's something really interesting about having those close friends that you've had incredible times with but growing up and away from them. The underlying tensions, the shifting in the group dynamic, the little lies you tell to big yourself up: it's something that happens to us all.

Or a White Englishman would rather smash a White Frenchman than a Jew! Crazy!

Having loved the Stones all the time I was growing up, I wasn't about to see them go and split up. It got very close to it in the 80s, when Mick thought that Keith hated him and vice versa.

Virtually all of Africa's civil wars were started by politically marginalized or excluded groups.

How can you hope to build up a nation by fragmenting its politics into opposing camps? Whatever one group builds, the other will endeavour to destroy..

Disharmony is natural in any band.

I’d rather eat out of a can than be strangled by a faction.

Humans can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet they're potentially more vicious than any other. They are the only ones who can be persuaded to hate millions of their own kind whom they have never seen and to kill as many as they can lay their hands on in the name of their tribe or their God.

When fear displaces reason, the result is often irrational hatred and division.