ISOLATION

Related Subjects: Responsibility, Society, Solitude

1. "Let them stew in their own juice," but that juice is the lifeblood of all mankind, and it is thicker than the mountains and deeper than the seas which, are supposed to insure us a private prosperity and a separate peace. . . . Look well. . . upon this world in which you ask us to disclaim all citizenship. Already the tramping of the millions across the sea sets up a tremor in the wheat fields of Nebraska.—HEYWOOD BROUN, New Lamps for Old
   

2. But it was Cain who first voiced and set the philosophy of isolation and rugged individualism . . . Will it be well for us to wash our hands and say with the cynicism of Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?"—HEYWOOD BROUN, My Brother's Keeper

3. But we will be useless even to our own interests if we close our eyes and pretend our world ends at the misty line where some wooded American hill keeps its rendezvous with the sky. This is not the end of the world or the end of the road. There are sounds louder than the ticking of the clock. Time and space cannot be discarded, nor can we throw off the circumstances that we are citizens of the world. The blood of one is the blood of all. Our Lord dies once again.—HEYWOOD BROUN, There is no Hiding Place
   

4. Whenever our neighbor's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.—BURKE
   

5. If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the
   ocean.—HENRY CLAY
   

6. No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe; everyman is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine, if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Proneontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.—JOHN DONNE, Devotions (Source of title of novel by Ernest Hemingway.)
   

7. We cannot now be isolated from the wars, depressions, ideas, miseries, and cruelties of an unorganized world. We cannot be isolated from the structure of a world whose mighty industrial framework gathers up wars and depressions anywhere and implicates men everywhere.—FRANK P. GRAHAM, Democracy and the Second World War
   

8. Instead of minding their own business, the Fathers of the Republic never lost an opportunity to declare in favor of democratic movements, no matter in what part of the world. They had the vision to see that the clash between democratic government and autocratic government was not local but universal, and that the battle was not merely for a day but the struggle everlasting.—GEORGE CREEL, The "Isolation" Myth
   

9. None of us has the honour of living a life all to himself.—VICTOR HUGO
   

10. Half the world knows not how the other half lives.—Proverb
    

11. One cannot teach a nation that it must depend on itself for everything without teaching it to distrust other nations and regard them as potential enemies.—CLARENCE STREIT, Union Now
    

12. The Atlantic Ocean may still be our bulwark. But this world is, despite all we can do, one economic unit.—WILLIAM A. WHITE, Defense for America
    

13. America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.—WOODROW WILSON