Insularity Quotes

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

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

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias - why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there's a primitive instinct to defend one's turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.
Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group's leader "does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion."
Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, "the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk." In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. "Terrorists are made, not born," Sunstein observed, "and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts. ~ Michiko Kakutani

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

The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking."
"You keep saying them," Dreyfus said.
"For a reason," Stasov answered. ~ Alastair Reynolds

First we have to step out of our dream of separation, the insularity with which we have imprisoned ourselves, and acknowledge that we are a part of a multidimensional living spiritual being we call the world. The world is much more than just the physical world we perceive through the senses, just as we are much more than just our own physical bodies. Only as a part of a living whole can we help to heal the whole. Just as we need to work together with the outer ecosystem, we need to work together with the inner worlds. We need their support and help, their power and knowledge. The devas understand the patterns of climate change better than we do, because they are the forces behind the weather and the winds. Just as plant devas know the healing powers of plants (and taught the shamans and healers their knowledge), so are there more powerful devas that know and guide the patterns of evolution of the whole planet. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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

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

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

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

...I shall let [Anne] Wallace put the case herself, at what I think is necessary length:

'As travel in general becomes physically easier, faster, and less expensive, more people want and are able to arrive at more destinations with less unpleasant awareness of their travel process. At the same time the availability of an increasing range of options in conveyance, speed, price, and so forth actually encouraged comparisons of these different modes...and so an increasingly positive awareness of process that even permitted semi-nostalgic glances back at the bad old days...Then, too, although local insularity was more and more threatened...people also quite literally became more accustomed to travel and travellers, less fearful of 'foreign' ways, so that they gradually became able to regard travel as an acceptable recreation. Finally, as speeds increased and costs decreased, it simply ceased to be true that the mass of people were confined to that circle of a day's walk: they could afford both the time and the money to travel by various means and for purely recreational purposes...And as walking became a matter of choice, it became a possible positive choice: since the common person need not necessarily be poor. Thus, as awareness of process became regarded as advantageous, 'economic necessity' became only one possible reading (although still sometimes a correct one) in a field of peripatetic meanings that included 'aesthetic choice'.'

It sounds a persuasive ~ Robin Jarvis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their insularity made him envious - not just of the men but all three of them. They were working together, two men and a girl, with evident ease. Even after the diving suit was on and she no longer looked like a girl, he was resentful of their shared knowledge, their nomenclature and expertise. ~ Jennifer Egan

Insularity plus time yields divergence. ~ Quammen, David

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

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

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

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