Insularity Quotes & Sayings

The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable. — Barbara W. Tuchman

What's wrong with "the new elite?" Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the "new elite" is that they're not an elite at all. That is, they aren't particularly smart, or competent. — Glenn Reynolds

She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. — Sinclair Lewis

Okay," he said slowly as his ulcer came back with friends. "To certain death, dismemberment, and undignified screams, let us march! — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Why do you ... keep tantalizing me?
I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt,
For a sit you could catch,
If I didn't know just honest and pure you are. — Thomas Hardy

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming. — Epeli Hau'ofa

I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. — Jamaica Kincaid

Travel was a species of warfare. — E. M. Forster

It's alright," they say, "Of course, there's beauty there," but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the farawayness of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them for their disregard of the Brits' role in the colonial tragedy of my country. — Christos Tsiolkas

They have extended the arrogance and insularity of the worst kind of academic professionalism beyond the academy. Generally they show no fear or even slight anxiety at the responsibility they have assumed; they have no sense of awe in the face of the questions they have raised, and no sense of humility in the face of the traditions which they condescendingly dismiss. They are aggressively without a sense of mystery and without a suspicion that anything might be too deep for their narrowly professional competence. They mistake these vices for the virtues of thinking radically, courageously and with an unremitting hostility to obscurantism. — Raimond Gaita

Give us but the chance and a new generation of Earthmen would grow to maturity, lacking insularity and believing wholeheartedly in the oneness of Man. — Isaac Asimov

Great Britain, for instance, is too big and too diverse to be home to a small-island civilization, but in modern times the English - though not, I think, other peoples of the island - have cultivated what might be called a small-island mentality: all their most tiresome history books stress, sometimes in their opening words, that their history is a function of their insularity. They still write and read histories with such titles as Our Island Story and The Offshore Islanders.4The conviction that their island "arose from the azure main" and is like a gem "set in the silver sea" resounds in national songs and scraps of verse which they hear repeatedly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English invested heavily in naval security. They created the cult of the "English eccentric" - which is a way of idealizing the outcome of isolation. They have projected an image as "a singular race, one which prides itself on being a little mad. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Insularity plus time yields divergence. — Quammen, David

The Englishman's strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American's disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Leaders should interact with everyone in their organization as if the interaction is being recorded and will be used as a training film on how to treat colleagues, coworkers, and customers. — Bill Crawford

If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence. — Barack Obama

One of the hallmarks of evangelicalism, and by extension ex-gay ministry, is the vigilance with which it guards its own internal content as both normative and binding. One could say that a lot of energy is spent on boundary maintenance - discerning who is inside and who is outside of the boundaries of shared commitments. ... Anything that seemed to deviate from the commonly held beliefs and understandings about homosexuality and healing were considered invalid and potential deceptions from the enemy. To investigate or inquire beyond these commonly held assumptions was dangerous territory, where one would be vulnerable to error. — Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

One of the cost of holding a Federal office was geographic isolation in the nation's capital. — Harold Holzer

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover. — Tom Stoppard

Insularity is the foundation of ethnocentrism and intolerance; when you only know of those like yourself, it is easy to imagine that you are alone in the world or alone in being good and right in the world. Exposure to diversity, on the contrary, is the basis for relativism and tolerance; when you are forced to face and accept the Other as real, unavoidable, and ultimately valuable, you cannot help but see yourself and your 'truths' in a new - and trouble - way. — David Eller

Hers was that common insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they. — Jack London

There are proven ways to win the loyalty of tough, strong, ferocious men: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. — Frank Herbert

Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms - even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society. — Victor Davis Hanson

For over twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town. — Annie Dillard

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you. — Peter Kreeft

Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days
the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals. — Emmuska Orczy