Lawrence Lessig Quotes

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.

People want to be with their own and want to be separated from others.

Thinking of ourselves as members of 'this group' or 'that group,' I think that's a recipe for division.

Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.

I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

Stay out of the loop, the club, the inner circle.

The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.

You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.

It's a clique that I've never been a part of. It's not like I identify them in a negative way.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.

People have evolved into something selfish, greedy and intolerant. People are unaccepting, because of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation... I've seen it in punk clubs, and I've seen it in the world.

In community people remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, while in society they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors.

The cultural barriers and social and economic differences separating the Africans and African-Americans is sometimes the cause of a simmering hostility and misunderstanding between them. Sharing the common physical characteristic of skin color has not ensured cultural and economic unity between African immigrants and American-born blacks.

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.

Caste is about dividing people up in ways that preclude every form of solidarity, because even in the lowest castes, there are divisions and sub-castes, and everyone's co-opted into the business of this hierarchical, silo-ised society.

Everyone hates the best clubs, it is as simple as that.

Human evolution relies on cooperation, which is why identity politics feels so backward.

I don't think it's helpful to put them all in a box and say people are evil and freaks because they have gotten to the point where they have fallen out of the community of what it is to be a human being. That's worthy of investigation.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race - racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic - what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.