Tribal Mentality Quotes

To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.

One of us... One of them... One of us... One of them... A rhythm playing like train wheels on a circular track -- never ending but going nowhere.

People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

The world's a jungle in my eyes, innit? Everything's tribal. If you see someone who don't look like you - especially the colour of your skin - you're going to be suspicious, or not as welcoming or warming, innit? I've learned not to take it too personal.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

The modern tribalism of the left demands that each person choose a group and then agree with everything that group agrees with. And anybody who leaves that group is stoned to death.

I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.

Nobody sees people as people. It's all how they relate to my little group.

Having grown up in a Catholic family, while I felt like I was never conscious of any blatant anti-Semitism, I was aware of a slightly insidious, us-versus-them mentality. A lot of my best friends and early girlfriends were Jewish, and I encountered what was more of a suburban small-mindedness, of people needing to defend their tribe.

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

If truth be told, certainly culturally, I never felt totally comfortable in the Labour party, because I've never really been a massively tribal politician.

The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

It is almost impossible to convince people who are under the influence of ideological bigotry that whose whom they regard as belonging to the enemy species are human.

The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group - indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

Random, meaningless groups can adopt an us-versus-them mentality.

I have come to understand that my hatred of the gym was based on fear and prejudice, a tribal resistance to science, to improvement. But to ignore my aging physicality and not try and become the strongest and fittest I can be is curmudgeonly at best and wilfully ignorant at worst.

Belief that your tribe is good and other tribes are evil is what everyone thought for most of human history.

I think there is tribalism is a big deal inside of the church, that the church thinks of themselves as a tribe and not a mission.

I think the boarding schools are like miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.