Quotes / We ARE Struggling Together

"I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

— Will Rogers

(The Campaign for Free Galilee and the People's Front of Judea are fighting over who had the idea to kidnap Pilate's wife)
Brian: Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!
Francis: We are!
Brian: We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!
Everyone: The Judean People's Front?!
Brian: No, no! The Romans!
Everyone: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Francis: Yeah. He's right. Let's go in, get her out, and we can argue afterwards.

— Monty Python's Life of Brian

"Now Roman is to Roman, more hateful than a foe. As we wax hot in faction, in battle we wax cold."

— Sir Thomas Maculay, Lays Of Ancient Rome

"No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom."

— F.A. Hayek

"You wrote: 'The remains of the revolutionary movement must be gathered together and all powers hostile to tyranny must unite; we must stop our old internal struggles and start the common fight afresh.' That is wrong. The Party must not join the Moderates. It is they who in all good faith have countless times betrayed the movement, and they will do it again the next time, and the time after next. He who compromises with them buries the revolution."

— Rubashov, Darkness at Noon

"This is the same city where people were perfectly willing to fight a civil war while a zombie apocalypse dropped on their heads."

— Adam Anders, Domina

"Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings..."

— Good Omens

"You should have disagreements with your leaders and your colleagues, but if it becomes immediately a question of questioning people's motives, and if immediately you decide that somebody who sees a whole new situation differently than you must be a bad person and somehow twisted inside, we are not going to get very far in forming a more perfect union."

— Bill Clinton

Ray: They're perfectly in sync. They always agree on everything. We can't even agree on whose turn it is to cook dinner.
Sara: Not it.

— Legends of Tomorrow (comparing the Justice Society of America to the Legends)

"I will unite instead of divide. I will bring men together."

— Second Ideal of the Bondsmiths, The Stormlight Archive

...which had prompted another round of what I refused to even call bickering. I knew bickering, it was the true tongue of all my closest friends. There was fondness in bickering, a give and take. This was just an ugly brew of distrust and spite spilling over what should have been an exceedingly straightforward matter.

— A Practical Guide to Evil

"It is said that the founding First Prince spoke of Procer as a great tower, every principality a stone raising it to ever greater heights. I have found the sentiment more poetic than accurate. Procer is no single tower but twenty-three of them, and their owners constantly steal each other's stones to rise at the expense of the others."

— Princess Eliza of Salamans, A Practical Guide to Evil

In theory, Order of Hermes mages hold that they serve humanity by resisting the Technocracy, studying arcane lore and transforming that lore into everyday reality. In practice, they have become so entwined in political intrigue within their own Chantries that Technomancers have to come knocking down their doors before they remember their stated mission.

—Mage: The Ascension - Book Of Shadows: Player's Guide

"Okay, that's our connection. Let's go get her."
"And do what?" Phi asked before Alice could.
"Bring her back here!" he bellowed. "Interrogate her. Get the truth out of her so we can stop this nuclear war from happening! This ends here."
"Oh, for fuck's sake; this is exactly the kind of attitude that got your ass kicked last night!" Alice shot back.
"I did not get my ass kicked!"
"Can we not yell?" Clover asked.
"If we fail, it'll be because of the arrogance of you, and Akane, and everyone in this damn organization!" she continued, ignoring her partner. "You should have taken someone with you on that damn mission!"
"I didn't want to put any more lives at risk!"

— Honing In On The Heart Of It All here, a Zero Time Dilemma fic

Elizabeth: The girl is a fugitive.
Nita: From what? From an unlawful prison that's being closed down anyway? I really don't think it's at all relevant anymore.
Elizabeth: So you have been deliberately withholding information from this department?
Anderson: OH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! Didn't even get as far as the bloody door. Solidarity, people, solidarity! The good kind, not when labor unions do it.

— Differently Morphous

"Brothers and sisters are natural enemies! Like Englishmen and Scots! Or Welshmen and Scots! Or Japanese and Scots! Or Scots and other Scots! Damn Scots! They ruined Scotland!"

— Groundskeeper Willie, The Simpsons

The Detective: Hang on, what will I do once I establish contact with my fellow communists?
Rhetoric: You'll discuss the monumental world-historical task that lies before you. You'll engage in rigorous and spirited debates about Mazovian theory and practice. But mostly you'll probably complain about other communists.
The Detective: Isn't that last part kind of counterproductive?
Rhetoric: Not at all. Complaining about other communists is one of the most important parts of being a communist.

— Disco Elysium

For forty years — as Denny Brennan's series revealed — Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI's domestic surveillance program to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Hertz Shemets's brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other.

— The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Bardin Goreksson: Perhaps it's past time our realms stood as one with the humans.
Kerillian: We'll not see such a day. We cultivate distrust as a farmer cultivates his crops.

— The End Times: Vermintide

These walls are vibrating with defeatism and frustration. Emotions that can kill any effort, pull any team apart. And we're hardly the most natural ensemble to begin with!

— Contrary, Ultraforce (Vol. 1)

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