# a house divided

idiom · CEFR C1

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/a-house-divided
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

A group weakened by internal conflict and unable to survive its own disunity.

## Examples

- The party is a house divided and can't agree on anything.
- With the founders openly feuding, the company had become a house divided that no outside rival needed to attack.
- By the time the vote was called, the coalition was a house divided, each faction more intent on defeating the others than on the opponent they had all been elected to resist.

## Origin

The phrase comes from Jesus's reply to accusers in Mark 3:25: if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. He is answering the charge that he casts out demons by demonic power, pointing out that no power turned against itself endures. Here house means household or dynasty — a family, faction, or realm — and the argument is coldly logical rather than moral: internal division is fatal regardless of external strength. Abraham Lincoln gave the phrase its most famous later outing in his 1858 speech on a nation half slave and half free, and in English a house divided now names any organisation or movement being pulled apart from within, its collapse traced not to enemies but to itself.

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