Isolationist America Quotes & Sayings

How to paint the landscape: First you make your bow to the landscape. Then you wait, and if the landscape bows to you, then, and only then, can you paint the landscape. — John Marin

America was not interventionist enough, which, of course, did mean a bit of a breach with old comrades on the left. I felt the international left in the countries concerned took the same position as I did. So, in my view, it's the left that's become reactionary and isolationist and parochial. — Christopher Hitchens

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament. — Richard Hofstadter

A British journalist, Sydney Brooks, writing in the North American Review, gauged America to be just as isolationist as ever. And why not, he asked? "The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-packed older world." While easy in concept, neutrality in — Erik Larson

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone. — Billy Bragg

You do not have to unburden your soul for everyone; it will be enough if you do that for those you love. — Albert Camus

Being well acquainted with the psychology of castes, and also with the psychology of other categories of crowds, I do not perceive a single case in which, wrongly accused of a crime, I should not prefer to have to deal with a jury rather than with magistrates. I should have some chance that my innocence would be recognised by the former and not the slightest chance that it would be admitted by the latter. The power of crowds is to be dreaded, but the power of certain castes is to be dreaded yet more. Crowds are open to conviction; castes never are. — Gustave Le Bon

Nothing gets on other people's nerves at the office more than a whistler. And the sad part is, these whistlers don't know they're doing it. Someone should, tactfully, tell the whistler how much it disrupts the office environment. — Letitia Baldrige

Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact ... — Charles Babbage

Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic. — Helen Rowland

It is so strange to take this journey together when there is such distance between us. — Ally Condie

If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings. — Nathaniel Hawthorne