“X” Quotations

• In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in “Kubla Khan” (1816)

(see also FEAR and HATRED and HOMOPHOBIA and PHOBIAS and RACISM & RACIAL PREJUDICE and SEXISM)

• I hear a lot of talk today about xenophobia. Is it really phobia if you have something to be afraid of? Bill Maher, in “Bill Maher Questions Xenophobia” (interview With Ian Schwartz), RealClear Politics (June 26, 2016)

• Xenophobia doesn’t benefit anybody unless you’re playing high-stakes Scrabble. Dennis Miller, in Ranting Again (1999)

• Xenophobia is a fear of individuals who look or behave differently than those one is accustomed to. Adrian M. S. Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,” in Robin May Schott, Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (1997)

Piper continued: “It is a fear of what is experientially unfamiliar, of individuals who do not conform to one’s empirical assumptions about what other people are like, how they behave, or how they look.”

• Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” in Unpopular Essays (1950)