Isolationism Quotes

“Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.”

“I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change.”

“You can't build a wall round a village.The sun and the windwill always find their way in.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”