societal fragmentation Quotes

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

I worry about America. For the first time in my lifetime, I'm worried about us, i'm worried about how our values to some degree have been eroded, of personal responsibility and compassion and teamwork. I worry about it, I worry about the fact that we're so divided.

Our culture is just too comfortable in creating these kind of divisions between culture.

There are some people who are so partisan that they do not live in the word the rest of us are in.

The emphasis on the birth of Christ tends to polarize our pluralistic society and create legal and ethnic belligerence.

The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.

People don't talk about the amount of destruction in terms of human lives that happen, whether it's through slavery, or through, for example, what Belgium was doing in the Congo - the fragmentation of society that happened after that destruction of human life.

I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions.

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.

Some people say that there is too much “Pluribus,” and not enough “Unum” in our society.

As long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.

America, fortunately or unfortunately, is very polarized right now. People fall into their different camps. And people are, are concerned. And they, they want to see change.

I came away believing and really deeply troubled by is the extent to which you can have two well-intentioned people talking in a friendly spirit and you get to a point where the two mutual mythologies just don't intersect. So kind of the next piece I'd like to write or think about is how did this left-right divide get so weird and codified.

The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.

I don't think things are getting more insane. I do know that the country is more divided than it's ever been. Tensions in America are at their peak.

Why is this polarization in America? Why is there these very different views about the world? Part of it is that there are very different worlds that people are inhabiting.

One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

I think we're really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families.

Watching our entire country implode under the self-serving ideologies of those so eager to claim everything but the Constitution as their guide leaves at least half of us without a home. We may live on the same land, but our nation and the citizens of that nation have been exiled into a national wilderness.

In America, we had a totally divided country for eight years and long before that. In all fairness to President Obama, long before President Obama we have had a very divided - I didn't come along and divide this country. This country was seriously divided before I got here.

There's a fundamental disconnection in society in the way we live, this way we live that we take so for granted, and we've become very separate from one another and we don't really take lot of time to realize that. And the math is overwhelming to the point of despair, but the answers could be so simple.

I've been coming to America since 1970, and it's like my second home, but I've never felt such a divided country, ever. I didn't think it would get to this point, and it breaks my heart.

The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.