“If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism.”

context (12) "The Sociological Counterpart of Cheyne-Stokes Respiration" <!-- [Italics in source] -->
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Context: If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.

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John Brunner 147
British author 1934–1995

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