Political Radicalization Quotes

There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth or whatever. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.

If there had been a charismatic figure in the United States who could mobilize fears, anger, racism, a sense of loss of the future that belongs to us, this country could be in real danger. We're lucky that there never has been an honest, charismatic figure. McCarthy was too much of a thug, you know? Nixon was too crooked. Trump, I think, is too much of a clown. So, we've been lucky.

Extremists on the left tend to be just as critical of pragmatism as extremists on the right.

While anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties across Europe may not take power anywhere in 2017, theirs is now a permanent and growing presence, leeching away support from centrist parties left and right.

We're all interconnected. For example, a simple lack of fresh water can lead to population dislocation, which can lead to political radicalization, which can lead to great pressure on the states that receive refugees because of a migrating population.

I was an avowed professional revolutionary by the time I was 15.

We've been very lucky to have UKIP in the U.K. If we hadn't been here, the BNP would be doing very well.

Terrorist organizations with specific political agendas may be encouraged and emboldened by Yasser Arafat's transformation from outlaw to statesman.

If we were in another country, we would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they’re doing to this country.

Apparently the Republican base got radicalized first, and Democrats picked up the ball later. Or something.

...their callous indifference to the plight of children streaming across the border, fleeing horrific circumstances in their own country. Republicans are simply strangled by extremism. There is no more establishment, or middle or moderate wing. You've got the Steve King wing of the Republican Party today, who raised the specter of impeachment this weekend.

I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.

The best way to make Communists is to put the Americans into a place where there were no Communists before.

There's a radical insurgency, which is a large part of the Republican base, which is willing to do anything, destroy the country, whatever, in order to get rid of this Affordable Care Act. That's the one thing that they're able to hang onto.

By pumping up hyper-partisanship, our country (America) is playing with forces that can easily get out of control. We are giving purpose and cover - and sometimes a sense of purpose - to the crazy among us. We are encouraging a culture of extremism

When runaway inflation and bank failures struck in Germany in the 1920s, the middle class was destroyed, which led directly to the rise of the Nazis.

I have always noticed that whenever a radical takes to Imperialism, he catches it in a very acute form.

Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the "legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago." There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.

Look at the John Birch Society. Look at Hitler. The reactionaries are always better organizers.

Perhaps the biggest boost to the LePenization of French politics came from Nicolas Sarkozy. As president of France between 2007 and 2012, he actively courted FN voters and helped dismantle the 'Republican pact,' under which the two main parties had pledged to work together to defeat the FN at a national and local level.

Terrorism is a state of mind that on the one hand has to do with ignorance and, on the other hand, can be attributed to a feeling of desperation over the political situation, which at some point takes the form of revenge.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

More evidence of the increasingly porous boundaries between mental illness and leftwing politics.