Them Quotes

“There is a deep and corrosive tribal impulse to act as if "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jackass.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”3”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“If we really want to be happy, we must plant roots and tend them. that means, in large part, thinking carefully about how to get the best out of the technology that liberates us from inconveniences - without letting our devices cut us off from the richest parts of life.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, we’re also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Lacking meaningful attachments, people are finding a perverse bond in at least sharing a common enemy.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Many of our television hosts are modern-day carnival barkers. We get dopamine, adrenalin, and oxytocin all at once. It's an adult video game. But instead of expertly separating us from our wallets, they're separating us from things much more valuable. Our time, our sense of perspective, and our judgment. And they are separating us from each other.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“The fact that college campuses, once the cornerstone of free expression and open debate, are now among the most intellectually intolerant spaces in America should concern us deeply.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“As The Atlantic’s Julie Beck has written, we’re building “pillow forts” of comfortable information around us and making it more and more difficult for anything we don’t want to hear to penetrate.5”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) It’s about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal. Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962—when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like that—a war, or the return of a dormant disease. But what’s the “big thing” going on in America now? What’s killing all these people? The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimer’s, suicides, and unintentional injuries—a category that includes drug and alcohol–related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.1 We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Yet despite the complexity of contemporary society, there are still some simple formulas we can use to distill the path to social and economic flourishing. One of these, labeled the “Success Sequence,” and credited to Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the left-of-center Brookings Institute, proposes a three-step rule book for modern American life:

1. Finish high school.
2. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.)
3. Get married before having children.

When people follow this pattern—and crucially, in this order—life generally turns out pretty well.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Right now partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War. Why? It’s certainly not because our political discussions are more important. It’s because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up. Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we’re reduced to shrieking.3”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“When one half of the nation demonizes the other half, tendrils of resentment reach out and strangle whatever charitable impulses remain in us.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“As Putnam demonstrates, poorer, less-educated parents tend to believe that their primary task is getting their children to obey, as opposed to better-educated parents, who emphasize helping their children understand why they ought to obey a given rule. Reading, reasoning, and problem-solving with their parents help children develop the higher-order skills that make them better equipped to face the challenges of a fluid, complex world.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Freedom depends on an informed citizenry, and an informed citizenry depends on serious journalism that takes facts seriously and grapples with those facts honestly. But good journalism is less and less likely when there are fewer and fewer readers with an appetite for something more than titillation. Producers and consumers work in tandem—for better or for worse. Right now, the pool of trust that once made that relationship constructive has all but dried up.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“The sad reality behind our life expectancy decline is an increase in deaths of despair. Americans, particularly American men, are killing themselves, either directly with suicide or indirectly through the abuse of opioids and other addictive substances. Males between 20 and 55 years old—men in the prime of life—are dying at unprecedented rates, and they’re doing it to themselves. They’re doing it because they lack hope. We lack purpose. In many communities, there are no jobs, stores have shut down, and everybody seems to have given up. This, for many, is the end of rootlessness: homelessness.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“God cares not only about immaterial souls but also about the material world. We’re not spirits, zipping about. We’re bodies, too. And that whole complex—body plus soul—is always in a particular place, at a particular time. We’re right here, right now. Place matters.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“Work, after all, isn’t merely about providing for one’s family. It is certainly that, but it is also about having a sense of purpose, a means of serving one’s neighbors, a place to fit in.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“During the last upheaval of this scale, the Industrial Revolution, the concept of adolescence changed radically. Teenagers’ mission became finding the job they wanted to take when they left school, the paid calling they would stick with for the next several decades until they retired. Now, with an increasingly rootless work culture, it follows that a longer-term identity crisis, a pervading sense of unease, is plaguing the American workforce. All of us yearn to be called to something bigger than ourselves, yet most of us, most of the time, aren’t hearing that call at work.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“We want an America with free speech, religion, press, assembly, and protest - even for those we disagree with.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal

“Reverend King knew that the path to success could not be zero-sum—our side wins and your side loses.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“This is reality TV provocation, pure and simple. He loves it when the chyrons scream, Surely, surely, this is the thing that will take Trump down! He’s finally gone too far! He wants the twenty-four-hour coverage obsessing over him and his double-downs, partial pivots, and salacious provocations.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“And the media plays into his hand, every single time. By April 1, 2016, with a month still to go in the Republican primaries, Donald Trump had received the equivalent of $2 billion in free television coverage. All sixteen of his GOP opponents, by comparison, had received $1.2 billion combined. By the day of the November general election, Trump had earned just under $5 billion in free media—$1.75 billion more than Hillary Clinton.4”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“fun fact: there’s more computing power in the average digital washing machine today than was used to put the first man on the moon in 1969.)”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal