Toxic Discourse Quotes

Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes.

Sloganeering and name-calling have been some of the most unsavoury aspects of Leave/Remain conflicts over the past few years.

Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots.

What we don't need to work toward is polarizing America any greater than it is. Look, I'm up here in Washington, D.C., in the Congress of the United States, and we have, all day, a lot of verbal vomit that is doing enormous damage.

So much of modern politics is focused not on honest differences of policy but on personal attacks.

It's a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment. Suprisingly often, discussions degenerate into acrimony, insults and flames.

Problematic' is one of these meaningless jargon words that people on the internet outrage circles throw at one another.

On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.

I don't think Donald Trump is an ideologue, so it's not really his policies that I think are going to maybe fire people up. It's his rhetoric and, you know, his willingness to wield power in a manner that can be potentially exploitative and dangerous.

The fact is that it's the most dangerous place to be on the political scale is to brand those on the other side as racist. That's the atomic bomb. That's the nuclear weapon of an American.

I love having debates with people when they are debates but some people, you just can't. Some people shouldn't be given the oxygen.

This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks, not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in our nation’s history.

Too many on the Left are earnest about nothing at all, sadly. They've been rendered spineless by snarkiness - not least on Twitter.

If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it for the reptile from whom it has been fabricated.

Fratricide dominates our public debate, and America is held hostage with tactics of smear and fear.

If you spend all your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.

Many will equate words with violence, claiming that harsh criticism and invective are akin to physical abuse. According to this view, violence may be inflicted upon a person merely by offending them. Anyone who claims to believe this, despite never having experienced actual fist-in-their-face, gun-at-their-back, war-in-their-streets physical violence, may need to check their privilege. … if we tear down the distinction between words and violence, then why not simply use violence to solve our problems as a first rather than a last resort?

I think it was there before, but - because of social media, too - there are these people who fancy themselves as tolerant, and don't see the hypocrisy and double standard of how they're not tolerant at all, and they're just strident and they don't listen. There's no dialogue anymore. That's maybe, truly, the worst part of Trump's legacy is just people yelling at each other.