Isolationism Quotes

“If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.”
― Stephen Colbert

“America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.”
― John Quincy Adams

“That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.”
― Niall Ferguson

“Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“We isolated ourselves, because it hurt less.”
― Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home

“He is in many ways quite a right-wing isolationist. It's because some people are naïve enough to confuse this with anti-imperialism that they think of him as being rather more to the left than he really is.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Americans owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus democracy throws [a man] back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from the peaceniks, who both argue in a semi-literate way that neo-conservativism is Trotskyism and 'permanent revolution' reborn.

Sometimes, you have to comb an overt anti-Semitism out of this propaganda before you can even read it straight. And I can guarantee you that none of these characters has any idea at all of what the theory of 'permanent revolution' originally meant.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“One real meeting is much better than a thousand internet or social media words.”
― Stephen Richards

“Gov. Christie says 'New Jersey First.' State-based Isolationism!”
― Jonah Goldberg

“You can't build a wall round a village.
The sun and the wind
will always find their way in.”
― Igor Goldkind, Is She Available?

“Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation, whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind.”
― H.G. Wells, You Can't Be Too Careful

“It seems a lot of Christians are quick to condemn the world and write its inhabitants off as lost causes. It’s odd, though, Jesus never did. He healed and lovingly confronted. Jesus engaged and walked among his enemies, not to breathe fire upon them, but to breathe life into them. He could only change their lives through being part of their lives. He didn’t write books, he didn’t constrain his preaching to just the synagogues. He didn’t stand aloof bad mouthing the world and his enemies to his disciples in the safety of an insular compound. No, Jesus deliberately walked and lived amongst those he came to serve.”
― Katherine J Walden

“They are the children of the strangers," I told her. "They have no faces."
"They have eyes."
"Pretend they are birds.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“America is like an isolated information island. A lot of what happens in the rest of the world, a lot of the cultural exchange, never makes it to rural Alabama.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

“Social Distancing can create anxiety, loneliness, and depression. A sovereign being views Solitude as time to sand the rust off your vehicle, re-grout your shower, rake the leaves, or renovate yourself. Solitude is meditation in motion.”
― Deborah Bravandt

“The persistence of superannuated institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of a rancid odour clinging to the hair; the pretension of spoiled fish that insists on being eaten, the tenacious folly of a child's garment trying to clothe a man, or the tenderness of a corpse returning to embrace the living.

"Ingrates!" exclaims the garment. "I shielded you in weakness. Why do you reject me now?" "I come from the depths of the sea," says the fish; "I was once a rose," cries the odour; "I loved you," murmurs the corpse; "I civilized you," says the convent.

To this there is but one reply; "In the past."

To dream of the indefinite prolongation of things dead and the government of mankind by embalming; to restore dilapidated dogmas, regild the shrines, replaster the cloisters, reconsecrate the reliquaries, revamp old superstitions, replenish fading fanaticism, put new handles in worn-out sprinkling brushes, reconstitute monasticism; to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites; to foist the past upon the present, all this seems strange. There are, however, advocates for such theories as these. These theorists, men of mind too, in other things, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a coating of what they term divine right, respect for our forefathers, time-honored authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy; and they go about, shouting, "Here! take this, good people!" This logic was familiar to the ancients; their soothsayers practised it. Rubbing over a black heifer with chalk, they would exclaim, "She is white" Bos cretatus.

As for ourselves, we distribute our respect, here and there, and spare the past entirely, provided it will but consent to be dead. But, if it insists upon being alive, we attack it and endeavor to kill it.

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them, body to body, and make war upon them and that, too, without cessation; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash upon the ground.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries. A 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army colonels suggests that militarily, technologically and economically weaker states can use unorthodox forms of warfare to defeat a materially superior enemy – and clearly they had the United States and NATO in mind. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, the weaker state might succeed against the dominant opponent by shifting the arena of conflict into economic, terrorist and even legal avenues as leverage to be used to undercut more traditional means of warfare. The subtitle of their book, Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization, notes a core truth of the early twenty-first century: an increasingly globalized world deepens reliance upon, and the interdependence of, nations, which in turn can be used as leverage to exploit, undermine and sabotage a dominant power.

The two colonels might not be happy with the lesson their book teaches Westerners, which is that no superpower can afford to be isolationist. One way to keep America great, therefore, is to stay firmly plugged into – and leading – the international system, as it has generally done impressively in leading the Western world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine. The siren voices of American isolationism inevitably lead to a weaker United States.”
― David Petraeus, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine

“In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn’t much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn’t want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Isolation gives time but not immunity.”
― Lamine Pearlheart

“separation is not a salubrious state of affairs, isolation is preferably an insane affair”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“there some coloureds, negroes, blacks, cd make a living big enough to leave there to come here: but no one went there much any more for all sorts of reasons. the big reason being immigration restrictions & unemployment. nowadays, immigration restrictions of every kind apply to any non-european persons who want to go there from here. just like unemployment applies to most non-european persons without titles of nobility or north american university training. some who want to go there from here risk fetching trouble with the customs authority there. or later with the police, who, can tell who's not from there cuz the shoes are pointed & laced strange/the pants be for august & yet it's january/the accent is patterned for port-au-prince, but working in crown heights. what makes a person comfortably ordinary here cd make him dangerously conspicuous there.

so some go to london or amsterdam or paris, where they are so many no one tries to tell who is from where. still the far right wing of every there prints lil pamphlets that say everyone from here shd leave there & go back where they came from.”
― Ntozake Shange

“The architects of the Trump administration's foreign policy use two labels to describe the structure they have built: “Principled Realism” and “Putting America First.” Principled Realism is merely a slogan; America First is a slogan with a past. Founded in 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) brought together pacifists, isolationists, and Nazi sympathizers to fight against the country’s prospective entry into World War II. The AFC opposed creation of the Selective Service and also a Roosevelt initiative, known as Lend-Lease, to keep the British in food and arms as they struggled to survive the German onslaught. Within twelve months of its founding, the committee had built a membership of more than 800,000 and attracted support from across the political spectrum—corporate tycoons and Socialists alike. Contributing mightily to its popularity was the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who worried that Jewish influence was pushing the country into a conflict it did not, in his view, have reason to fight.

Four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. The AFC soon disbanded and, in the intervening decades, its name has carried the stigma of naïveté and moral blindness. Now “America First” is back—but what does it mean?”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“International life is carried on between the extremes of isolationism and internationalism. We try to help our fellow human beings in some ways, at some times, and in some places; but we do not actually take overall responsibility for their welfare.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“I spend long hours contemplating my existence and the meaning of this isolation. The thoughts are dark and heavy, often leading me down spirals of despair.”
― Rove Monteux, Living in a Bunker: A diary of the life in a bunker

“Isolationism is an instinctive and even understandable reaction to the ugliness of the modern interconnected world. For some politicians in democracies, it will continue to offer a successful path to power. The campaign for Brexit succeeded by using the metaphor "take back control," and no wonder: everyone wants more control in a world where events on the other side of the planet can affect jobs and prices in our local towns and villages. But did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world? Did it prevent foreign money from shaping U.K. politics? Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“In those dreamy years of lingering isolationism we Americans thought of both Asia and Europe as a museum of inanimate ruins. The history I was then witnessing could not be brought home "to sit on." The living humanity in the old world was far more important than its relics and its problems would affect the lives and fortunes of our own sons for man years to come.”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning

“The temptation of what is sometimes called realism—the belief that nations are solely motivated by a struggle for power, that they have eternal interests and permanent geopolitical orientations—is as strong as that of isolationism, and can be equally misleading, not least because it appeals to the indifferent. If nations never change, then of course we don’t need to exert the effort to make them change. If nations have permanent orientations, then all we need to do is discover what those are and get used to them. If nothing else, the Ukraine war showed us that nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. Their behavior can be altered by acts of cowardice or bravery, by wise leaders and cruel ones, and above all by good ideas and bad ones. Their interactions are not inevitable; their alliances and enmities are not permanent. There was no coalition to aid Ukraine until February 2022, and then there was. That coalition then made what had appeared to be the inevitable, rapid conquest of Ukraine impossible. By the same token, a different kind of Russian leader, with a different set of ideas, could now end the war quickly.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.