"The country is splitting into dozens of blind, deaf, but screaming camps, each drawn together not by loyalty to an idea, but by the accident of race, age, sex, religious creed, or the frantic whim of a given moment—not by values held in common, but by a common hatred of some other group...."

"The country is splitting into dozens of blind, deaf, but screaming camps, each drawn together not by loyalty to an idea [nor to any principle], but by the accident of race, age, sex, religious creed, or the frantic whim of a given moment—not by values held in common, but by a common hatred of some other group....
    "When men abandon principles (i.e., their conceptual faculty), two of the major results are: individually, the inability to project the future; socially, the impossibility of communication.... A shrunken, range-of-the- moment mentality sees other men as the immediate cause of its troubles; it can see no further; forcing its demands on others is the only answer it can grasp.... 

    "What [people] need above all is the clarifying, reassuring, confidence-and- credibility-inspiring guidance of fundamental principles.... What they would regain is the power to understand, to consider, to judge—and to communicate with one another. What they would lose is the sense of suffocating in a smog of impotent bewilderment."

          ~ Ayn Rand, from her 1971 article 'Credibility + Polarisation'

[Hat tip Ayn Rand Institute Annual Report]