Quotes about isolation
page 2

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

People, Soul, Nature

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

Life, Art, Study

“I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Life, Feeling, Sense, Strong

“Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Women, Men, Personality

“There were a thousand secrets in her eyes, a thousand wounds. A lifetime of distrust and betrayal. Isolation. How did one overcome such things?”

Christine Feehan book Mind Game

Source: Mind Game

Secret, Betrayal

“I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

Fear, Universe

“It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.”

Wally Lamb book I Know This Much Is True

Source: I Know This Much Is True

Life, Way, Past, Future

“I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Health, Communication, Sense

“The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

People, Religion, Problem

“Every life, no matter how isolated, touches hundred of others. It's up to us to decide if those micro connections are positive or negative. But whichever we decide, it does impact the ones we deal with.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infamous

Life

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Lowland

Source: The Lowland

“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Literature, Silence

“Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”

Hannah Arendt book The Human Condition

Source: The Human Condition

“It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Support, Sister, Dependency

“Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny… it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Source: Blow-Up and Other Stories

“But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Loneliness

“Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Sense, Heart, Personality

“Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Loneliness, Despair

“Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Light

“I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.”

Caroline Knapp (1959–2002) American writer

Source: Appetites: Why Women Want

Pleasure, World, Fear

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

D.H. Lawrence book Studies in Classic American Literature

Source: Studies in Classic American Literature

Soul

“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room. Most important, a newborn infant could expect to live not to age forty-five, but to age seventy-two. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 1 ; Lead paragraph

Life, Death, Pain, War

“What has art to do with those things [Revolution, socialism]? Art will never come except from some little disregarded corner where some isolated man is studying the mysteries of nature, fully assured that the answer which he ﬁnds and which is good for him is good also for humanity, whatever may be the number of succeeding generations.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

as quoted by Romain Rolland in his book Millet, c. 1900; transl. Miss Clementina Black; published by Duckworth & Co, Londo / E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1919, p. 8
undated quotes

Art, Nature, Study

“Science, as traditionally defined, is fundamental to conservation biology but does no good if isolated from "softer" issues such as ethics, sociology, and political strategy. Indeed, there is nothing more dangerous than science in an ethical vacuum.”

Reed Noss (1952)

[Conservation Biology, Whither Conservation Biology?, June 1993, 7, 2, 215–217, 10.1046/j.1523-1739.1993.07020215.x, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1993.07020215.x] (quote from p. 215)

Science

““Fool. There is no why. The very word is a semantic fallacy. Ask me how and I can lay out for you cause and effect, one thing leading to another, the alcohol acting on a grieving man’s mind, the door inadequately guarded, the people within isolated from the common lot of humanity by the dreadful secret of their ancestry.”
He rattled his glass.
Nathan refilled it.
Faust drank. “But to ask why,” he continued, “implies that things happen for a purpose, and they do not. There is no purpose, no direction, no guidance to events. Nothing means anything. The world is a howling desert of meaningless, and reason is useless before it. There is only blind event.”
He stared off into the bleak landscapes of the future while Nathan refilled his glass and refilled his glass and refilled his glass.
He saw so clearly now, without delusion or hope. It was a crystal night of the soul.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (pp. 327-328)

People, Alcohol, Secret, World

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Men, People, Knowledge, Reading

“It has long seemed obvious — and is, in fact, the characteristic tone of European science — that “science” means breaking up complexes into their component elements. Isolate the elements, discover their laws, then reassemble them, and the problem is solved. All wholes are reduced to pieces and piecewise relations between pieces.
The fundamental “formula” of Gestalt theory might be expressed in this way. There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes…
We hear a melody and then, upon hearing it again, memory enables us to recognize it. But what is it that enables us to recognize the melody when it is played in a new key? The sum of the elements is different, yet the melody is the same; indeed, one is often not even aware that a transposition has been made… Is it really true that when I hear a melody I have a sum of individual tones (pieces) which constitute the primary foundation of my experience? Is not perhaps the reverse of this true? What I really have, what I hear of each individual note, what I experience at each place in the melody is apart which is itself determined by the character of the whole,”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

As quoted in: George Klir (2013), Facets of Systems Science, p. 25
"Gestalt Theory," 1924

Law, Hope, Way, Nature

“Every organism represents a system, by which term we mean a complex of elements in mutual interaction. From this obvious statement the limitations of the analytical and summative conceptions must follow. First, it is impossible to resolve the phenomena of life completely into elementary units; for each individual part and each individual event depends not only on conditions within itself, but also to a greater or lesser extent on the conditions within the whole, or within superordinate units of which it is a part. Hence the behavior of an isolated part is, in general, different from its behavior within the context of the whole… Secondly, the actual whole shows properties that are absent from its isolated parts.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

As cited in: D.C. (1969) "Systems Theory — A Discredited Philosophy". in: Abacus V. p. 4
1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960)

Life, Behavior, Parting, Dependency

“The guts of honey bee workers contain a distinctive community of bacterial species. They are microaerophilic or anaerobic, and were not clearly deliniated by earlier studies relying on laboratory culture of isolates under atmospheric oxygen levels. Recently, a more complete picture of the potential metabolism and functions of these bacteria have been possible, using genomic approaches based on metagenomic samples, as well as cultured isolates. Of these, most are host-restricted and are generally absent outside adult guts.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Current Opinion in Insect Science, 10, August 2015, 22–28, Genomics of the honey bee microbiome, 10.1016/j.cois.2015.04.003]

Communication, Study, Bee

“To strengthen the work of Congress I strongly urge an amendment to provide a four-year term for Members of the House of Representatives—which should not begin before 1972. The present two-year term requires most members of Congress to divert enormous energies to an almost constant process of campaigning—depriving this nation of the fullest measure of both their skill and their wisdom. Today, too, the work of government is far more complex than in our early years, requiring more time to learn and more time to master the technical tasks of legislating. And a longer term will serve to attract more men of the highest quality to political life. The nation, the principle of democracy, and, I think, each congressional district, will all be better served by a four-year term for members of the House. And I urge your swift action. Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam. That conflict is not an isolated episode, but another great event in the policy that we have followed with strong consistency since World War II. The touchstone of that policy is the interest of the United States—the welfare and the freedom of the people of the United States. But nations sink when they see that interest only through a narrow glass. In a world that has grown small and dangerous, pursuit of narrow aims could bring decay and even disaster. An America that is mighty beyond description—yet living in a hostile or despairing world—would be neither safe nor free to build a civilization to liberate the spirit of man. In this pursuit we helped rebuild Western Europe. We gave our aid to Greece and Turkey, and we defended the freedom of Berlin. In this pursuit we have helped new nations toward independence. We have extended the helping hand of the Peace Corps and carried forward the largest program of economic assistance in the world. And in this pursuit we work to build a hemisphere of democracy and of social justice. In this pursuit we have defended against Communist aggression—in Korea under President Truman—in the Formosa Straits under President Eisenhower—in Cuba under President Kennedy—and again in Vietnam.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Wisdom, Men, Hostility

“On the other end of this process, there are the finished forms which I sometimes portray at night with sporadic illumination. The obscurity isolates them and the light accentuates their volumes. My focus is on creating images of the buildings which have a sense of being unreal and that have a certain autonomy. Small and big parts of the building can now stand on their own and become independent characters.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

In: Hélène Binet’s ‘Forming | Portrait – Architecture of Zaha Hadid’ @ Gabrielle Ammann // Gallery http://sandsof.com/2012/11/24/helene-binets-forming-portrait-architecture-of-zaha-hadid-gabrielle-ammann-gallery/, sandsof.com, 24 November 2012

Sense, Light, Parting, Night

“As alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us. Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience. This feels sexy and enticing and may feel good for a while and sells a lot of tickets, but it’s spiritual poison.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 9, “...And Then You Die” (p. 207)

World, Feeling, Personality

“Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Source: Turning to one another (2002), p. 19

Universe

“The will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human personality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Six, The Flight From Laputa, p. 121

Personality

“It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation.... My work requires it – but I myself have no need or use for it – Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative – I think all chrysalises do – all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion –resurrection – the establishment of the entity. But now I’ve come up tot the outside of my casements.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Quote from Marsden Hartley Revisited or, Were We Really Ever There, Peter Plagens; Artforum 7, May 1969, p. 41
1931 - 1943

Life, Thinking, Change, Time

“The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

Pt. I.
The Aran Islands (1907)

Death, Pain, War, People

“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

105.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html 1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Behavior, Nature, Study, Universe

“I, the solitary fish, a fish apart
(apart at least from the tree fish and the stone fish),
write, at isolated moments, a tiny fish or two
whose glittering scales, so fleeting,
may only be the dark's embarrassed wink.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"In Heraclitus' River"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)

Fish, Tree

“While I expected serious, rigorous evaluation of my work, I was totally unprepared for the hostility and contempt shown me by women whom I did not and do not see as enemies. Despite their responses I share with them an ongoing commitment to feminist struggle. To me this does not mean that we must approach feminism from the same perspective. It does mean we have a basis for communication, that our political commitments should lead us to talk and struggle together. Unfortunately it is often easier to ignore, dismiss, reject, and even hurt one another rather than engage in constructive confrontation. Were it not for the overwhelmingly positive responses to the book from black women who felt it compelled them to either re-think or think for the first time about the impact of sexism on our lives and the importance of feminist movement, I might have become terribly disheartened and disillusioned. Thanks to them and many other women and men this book was not written in isolation. … Such encouragement renews my commitment to feminist politics and strengthens my conviction that the value of feminist writing must be determined not only by the way a work is received among feminist activists but by the extent to which it draws women and men who are outside feminist struggle inside.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Acknowledgments https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

Women, Men, Hostility, Books

“While working at Anna Freud's house, I found an unpublished letter in which he [Freud] told Fliess, less than two weeks after he gave the paper [The Aetiology of Hysteria], "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me." Both the immediate response to the paper, and the subsequent response were ones that Freud had not anticipated: his colleagues thought he was crazy to believe his women patients. This was bound to have a disastrous impact on a young physician with a growing family, eager to open a neurological/psychiatric clinical practice. Where were his referrals to come from, if his colleagues thought he was completely daft? I made this point to Anna Freud.
"Do you believe", I said, "that this could have had anything to do with his later abandonment of the theory?"
"No." She was adamant.
"But tell me, Miss Freud, why did you omit this passage from your published edition of the letters?"”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

"Because it makes my father sound so paranoid," was her response.
"But if it was the truth, then he was not paranoid, he was simply perceptive."
Source: Final Analysis (1990), pp. 175-176

Women, Truth, Family, Housing

“Once I was in solitary confinement, it provided me with the isolated moments to reflect on my past and to dwell upon something greater, something better than involving myself in thuggery and criminality. It had to be more to life than that. It had to be more than the madness that was disseminating throughout this entire prison.”

Stanley Tookie Williams (1953–2005) American criminal

Democracy Now! interview (2005)

Life, Past, Madness

“The change from one stable equilibrium to the other may take place as the result of the isolation of a small unrepresentative group of the population, a temporary change in the environment which alters the relative viability of different types, or in several other ways…”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, p. 102.

Way, Change

“Although it is by definition a union-oriented ideology, there is no perceptible syndicalist presence in any union. A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents. Only a rather small minority of North American anarchists are syndicalists. Syndicalism will persist, if at all, as a campus-based cult in increasing isolation from the main currents of anarchism.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

Source: Anarchy after Leftism (1997), Chapter 11: Anarchy after Leftism

“…A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man,"”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Study, Parting

“Unfortunately, this event appears to have been anything but an isolated incident. Our investigation showed that members of Ferguson’s police force frequently escalate, rather than defuse, tensions with the residents they encounter. And such actions are sometimes accompanied by First Amendment violations – including arresting people for talking back to officers, recording their public activities, or engaging in other conduct that is constitutionally protected.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

People, Appearance

“It is basically a bad idea to take some area of human thought and experience that has been the locus of careful analyses and subtle distinctions for centuries, and start again, as it were, from scratch. What in fact happens when this is done is that some ideas from that tradition re-emerge, but are isolated from the context in which they were embedded in the preceding conversation.”

John E. Hare (1949) British philosopher

Source: “Evolutionary Theory and Theological Ethics” (2012), p. 245

Idea

“Of course, violence is never justified. But seen in this context – amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices – it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg. In a sense, members of the community may not have been responding only to a single isolated confrontation, but also to a pervasive, corrosive, and deeply unfortunate lack of trust – attributable to numerous constitutional violations by their law enforcement officials including First Amendment abuses, unreasonable searches and seizures, and excessive and dangerous use of force; exacerbated by severely disproportionate use of these tactics against African Americans; and driven by overriding pressure from the city to use law enforcement not as a public service, but as a tool for raising revenue.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Law, Feeling, Imagination, Search

“It all came together then, you see — all the various isolated bits — and made a coherent pattern.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

A Murder is Announced (1950)

“I started to see human beings as little lonesome, water based, pink meat, life forms pushing air through themselves and making noises that the other little pieces of meat seemed to understand. I was thinking to myself, 'There's five billion people here but we've never been more isolated.' The only result of the aggressive individualism we pursue is that you lose sight of your compassion and we go to bed at night thinking, 'Is this all there is?”

Devin Townsend (1972) Canadian musician

because we don't feel fulfilled. Far Beyond Metal: Metal Hammer Interviews Devin http://www.farbeyondmetal.com/index.php?page_id=1120

Life, People, Feeling, Understanding

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art, Universe

“Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe - chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not -- expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system - cell, mind, society - would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required: say, the interplay of enzymes in a cell, of many mental processes conscious and unconscious, the structure and dynamics of social systems and the like.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), p. xix

Intelligence, Understanding, Learning, Universe

“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way. The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites. The New Left, which will eventually succeed it, could easily turn out to be equally crude.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Men, Way, Feeling

“So you can't take credit for your talents, but it really matters if you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses and your failings, but it matters if you correct them. Pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analyses. But they were no fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense are things like compassion and love: caring about well-being makes sense; trying to maximize your well-being and the well-being of others makes sense. There is still a difference between suffering and happiness, and love consists in wanting those we love to be happy. All of that still makes sense without free will.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3raA1EwrI. 2010s

Love, Happiness, Sense, Suffering

“The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

Feeling

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“The antipathy of the English settlers to the Indians was far too great to lead to the sort of miscegenation which was encouraged by the French … In the British colonies the half-breed was looked upon as an Indian … It was not until within the lifetime of those now living that an infusion of Indian blood became a subject of pride … unless one makes exception for such isolated tales as the somewhat grotesque Pocahontas tradition in Virginia.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

“The internal tendencies of every organism, if isolated, lead to its disintegration. But the processes of the wider system sustain and modify those internal tendencies by "nourishing" them and gradually increasing the mutual conformity of organism and environment.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 36

“I had this very interesting experience when I was about 13. I went to Finland and it was dead in the middle of winter. It was freezing cold. There was so much snow and I went to Ainola, which is Sibelius' house. It was completely isolated -- just snow and forest, trees and the lake, completely beautiful but very quiet. And very serene. And I thought, well, this is where he was composing his stuff. And his great symphonies and the violin concerto, this is where it basically came from. I also got this little handbook about Ainola and there's a part that says that Sibelius wouldn't allow running water in his house because it disturbed him and his thought processes. So his daughters had to go out to the well which was half a mile away and then bring back water. So I thought, "Wow!" This person was really that much into control and silence. So you go and look at the concerto after that and the way it starts in the beginning: very shimmery. Very beautiful. But in a way it is isolated, and you feel kind of lonely when you're playing that. And gradually of course it builds up into this great big climax when every single orchestra-like instrument known to mankind is clashing and you're trying to break out there and you're trying to play your heart out. But really it did help me realize what he is like.”

Sarah Chang (1980) violinist

PBS.org 1998 http://www.pbs.org/lflc/backstage/march3/chang.htm

Beauty, Way, Feeling, Tree

“Imagine if you were attacked in the street just for holding hands with your partner. Imagine if your children were bullied or isolated at school just for who they are. Sadly, such experiences remain part of everyday life for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) citizens in Europe. Discrimination should have no place in our Union.”

Věra Jourová (1964) Czech politician

From ' List of actions by the Commission to advance LGBTI equality' http://ec.europa.eu/justice/discrimination/files/lgbti_actionlist_en.pdf, Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers, 2016.

Life, Children, School, Imagination

“A national programme which would provide television to about 80% of India’s population during the next ten years would be of great significance to national integration, for implementing schemes of economic and social development and for the stimulation and promotion of electronic industry. It is of particular significance for population living in isolated rural countries”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

His priority in 1974 quoted in "Communication and National Development".

Country

“There is no Enlightenment, no evolutionary entrance into the truly Spiritual Condition of human existence, without ego-death, or transcendence of the mind. There must be the literal death of the separate and separative consciousness. In this moment, you are holding on to your sense of separate consciousness as if it were something tangible and material. You possess yourself through a great contraction of body and psyche. By virtue of this gesture, you have become rigid, mediocre, deluded, relatively loveless, self-possessed, and isolated. To be without an inner consciousness is, for you, unthinkable. To be incapable of feeling yourself as a separate consciousness is, for you, a terrifying prospect. Nevertheless, that is precisely the realization with which you must become completely comfortable.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

'Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!, p. 171

Death, God, Feeling, Sense

“The migratory movement is at once perpetual, partial and universal. It never ceases, it affects every people … [and although] at a given moment it sets in motion only a small number of each population … in fact there is never a moment of immobility for any people, because no migration remains isolated.”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Source: Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947, 1948, p. 9 as cited in: Sarah Collinson (1999) Globalisation and the dynamics of international migration implications for the refugee regime http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/4ff59b852.pdf. May 1999. p. 1

People, Universe

“Appearance and reality […] are not separated like oil and water in a vessel, but rather amalgamated like water and wine. To separate them, we must analyse them in the most 'classic' sense of the word: the elements of the mixture must be isolated.”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)

Reality, Sense, Water, Appearance

“12 principles for a 21st century conservatism.
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distant, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Speech of Jordan Peterson at Carleton Place for the Conservative Party of Ontario <nowiki>[12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyw4rTywyY0</nowiki>] Concepts

War, People, Family, Peace

“Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Letter in a private collection quoted in Gillian Lindsay - The Story of the Lark Rise Writer 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
Literary Observations

Life

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“The realization that systems are integrated wholes that cannot be understood by analysis was even more shocking in physics than in biology. Ever since Newton, physicists had believed that all physical phenomena could be reduced to the properties of hard and solid material particles. In the 1920s, however, quantum theory forced them to accept the fact that the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve at the subatomic level into wavelike patterns of probabilities. These patterns, moreover, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. The subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections, or correlations, among various processes of observation and measurement. In other words, subatomic particles are not “things” but interconnections among things, and these, in turn, are interconnections among other things, and so on. In quantum theory we never end up with any “things”; we always deal with interconnections.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 30.

“Heaven may not be a possible world when you take it in isolation by itself. It may be that the only way in which God could actualize a heaven of free creatures all worshiping Him and not falling into sin would be by having, so to speak, this run-up to it, this advance life during which there is a veil of decision-making in which some people choose for God and some people against God. Otherwise you don't know that heaven is an actualizable world. You have no way of knowing that possibility.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

[The Craig-Bradley Debate: Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?, 1994, http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley0.html], quoted in [William Lane Craig vs. Ray Bradley (debate review), Luke, Muehlhauser, 2011-04-27, Common Sense Atheism, http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=2523, 2011-10-21]

Life, God, People, World

“In the psychological fields most fundamental to the whole behavior of living things the transition seems inevitable to a Galileian view of dynamics, which derives all its vectors not from single isolated objects, but from the mutual relations of the factors in the concrete whole situation, that is, essentially, from the momentary condition of the individual and the structure of the psychological situation. The dynamics of the processes is always to be derived from the relation of the concrete individual to the concrete situation, and, so far as internal forces are concerned, from the mutual relations of the various functional systems that make up the individual.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 41; partly cited in: Kay Deaux, Mark Snyder (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. p. 74

Behavior

“When we examine this suggestion, we see that it is no more than a formal acknowledgement of a problem, the problem of how (by what institutional arrangement, by what organization of affairs) the equilibrium prices are to be discovered. Repeated trial and error, while the market stands in suspense awaiting the outcome, is not a practical resort. The number of distinct trials, even if confined to discrete steps of price and quantity, would be so immense that the necessary 'market day' would extend beyond human life-times… [The] theoretical ideal applies to mutually isolated days or moments, each to be treated as perfectly self-contained and looking to no yesterday and no tomorrow. But the real market is dealing with goods inherited from yesterday, and in means of production whose products will not be ready till tomorrow. Meanwhile the non-economic circumstances are changing and rendering each successive equilibrium obsolete.”

G. L. S. Shackle (1903–1992) British economist

Source: Epistemics and Economics. (1972), p. 150

Life, Error, Problem, Change

“Strategic intent describes a process of coping with turbulence through a direct, intuitive understanding of what is occurring in order to guide the work of a school. A turbulent environment cannot be tamed by rational analysis alone so that conventional strategic planning is deemed to be of little use. Yet it does not follow that a school's adaptive response must be left to a random distribution of lone individuals acting opportunistically and often in isolation as in a regime of intrapreneurship. Strategic intent relies on an intuitively formed pattern or gestalt”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

some would call it a vision — to give it unity and coherence
Source: Information Space, 1995, p. 36

School, Understanding

“These new means [in the modern film, 1920's] have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own... Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision... A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: 'Actualités, Fernand Léger', in 'Varietés nr. 1', 1928, pp. 522-23
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Life, Beauty, Shoe, Feeling

“Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Island (1962)

Children, Imagination, Chance, Country

“Hindu society has produced many communalists. Admitted. But it has also produced men like Mahatma Gandhi who went on a fast unto death to save the Muslims of Bihar from large-scale butchery. It has produced men like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who had the Bihari Hindus bombed from the air when they did not respond to the Mahatma’s call. These have not been isolated men in Hindu society, as Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and M. C. Chagla have been in Muslim society. The Mahatma was a leader whom the whole Hindu society honoured. Pandit Nehru has been kept as Prime Minister over all these years by a majority vote of the same Hindu society. “Now let me give you a sample of the leadership which Muslim society has produced so far, and in an ample measure. The foremost that comes to my mind is Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. Immediately after partition, there was a shooting in Sheikhupura in which many Hindus who were waiting for repatriation in a camp, were shot down. There was a great commotion in India, and Pandit Nehru had to take up the matter in his next weekly meeting with Liaqat Ali in Lahore. The Prime Minister of Pakistan had brought the Deputy Commissioner of Sheikhupura with him. The officer explained that the Hindus had broken out of the camp at night in the midst of a curfew, and the police had to open fire. Pandit Nehru asked as to why the Hindus had broken out of the camp. The officer told him that some miscreants had set the camp on fire. Pandit Nehru protested to Liaqat Ali that this was an amazing explanation. Liaqat Ali replied without batting an eye that they had to maintain law and order. This exemplifies the quality of leadership which Muslim society has produced so far. This…”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

From a speech by Hamid Dalwai. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (1994). Defence of Hindu society.

Death, Men, Law, Waiting

“1948 Black Mountain College N. C. Disciplined by Albers. Learned photography. Worked hard but poorly for Albers. Made contact with music and modern dance. Felt too isolated, Sue [Weil, they married soon, then] and I moved to NYC. Went to Art Students League. Vytlacil & Kantor. Best work made at home. Wht. Painting with no.'s best example. Summer 1950, Outer Island Conn. Married Sue Weil. Christoher (son) Born July 16, 1951 in NYC. First one man show Betty Parsons's”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 1980's, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art world of Our Time, 1980, pp. 55-56 : Autobiographic notes

Art, Music, Home, Mountain

“Socialism for me was never about nationalization or the power of the state, not just about economics or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life, a set of values, a belief in society, in co-operation, in achieving together what we cannot achieve alone. It is how I try to live my life, how you try to live yours—the simple truths—I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism and the irony of all our long years in opposition is that those values are shared by the vast majority of the British people.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted in "Socialism is So Hot Right Now" https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/socialism-hot-right-now/ (17 September 2018), by Jonah Goldberg, Commentary 1990s

Life, People, Truth, Family

“I felt I had nothing more to learn. It was the same thing wrapped up in different packaging again and again. I am not a brilliant dancer at all. But my packaging is great. You know, I have been a hippie all my life. And the dreams of the sixties that I had of living in a commune, of sharing, of never having more than I can use, of living life joyfully in nature -- that was the spirit that was inside me. And in the isolation of being a dancer I thought where is the giving, where is the sharing, with me sitting so far in a cold place? I knew I had to get back and I had to share what life had given me through dance. I was willing to give up my dance and work and beg to realise this dream. Because it would still be my dream, it would still be dance but how much joy it would give so many bodies.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

After learning Odissi dance, she toured all over the world performing Odissi dance and then settled in Switzerland but came back to establish a dance school. Quoted in in "I have been a hippie all my life".

Life, Dreams, Communication, Nature

“Mass struggle was utilized throughout the war by the Vietnamese communist party. It was used, first of all, because guerrilla warfare is one expression of the mass struggle. One cannot conceive of guerrilla war when it is isolated from the people. The guerrilla group is the numerically inferior vanguard of the great majority of the people, who have no weapons but express themselves through the vanguard.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

People's War, People's Army (1964)

War, People

“I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

A reply to Olbers' 1816 attempt to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

“Thoughts that cannot survive the open air and that evaporate as soon as we take them out of the room. To put them to the test of isolation. Take them out of the book where you found them, they do not endure.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Books

“What does it mean, then, to become part of God’s work in the world? What does it mean to live a Christian life? One way to answer that question is to look back into the life of the Trinity and the original creation. God made us to ever increasingly share in his own joy and delight in the same way he has joy and delight within himself. We share his joy first as we give him glory (worshipping and serving him rather than ourselves); second, as we honor and serve the dignity of other human beings made in the image of God’s glory; and third, as we cherish his derivative glory in the world of nature, which also reflects it. We glorify and enjoy him only as we worship him, serve the human community, and care for the created environment.
Another way to look at the Christian life, however, is to see it from the perspective of the final restoration. The world and our hearts are broken. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was an infinitely costly rescue operation to restore justice to the oppressed and marginalized, physical wholeness to the diseased and dying, community to the isolated and lonely, and spiritual joy and connection to those alienated from God. To be a Christian today is to become part of that same operation, with the expectation of suffering and hardship and the joyful assurance of eventual success.”

Tim Keller (pastor) book The Reason for God

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008), Ch. 14: The Dance of God

Life, Death, God, World

“Language and the human spirit are inextricably intertwined. We interpret the world through language. We express ourselves through language. Language is powerful. Language can bring us together or set us apart. It can be used to include — to bridge barriers between cultures, religions, worldviews — at the same time as it can be used to exclude by inflaming xenophobia and racism. Language can establish community and solidarity at the same time as it can be used to erect boundaries and divide communities. More often than not, when we turn on the TV we see language used to occlude — to hide reality — to deceive, to spin, to distract, to disempower, to reinforce us versus them conceptions of humanity. Language is no longer innocent. We can no longer conceptualize language as some kind of neutral code that can be taught in classrooms in splendid isolation from its intersection with issues of power, identity, and spirituality.”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Religion, Communication, Reality

“The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance—are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions?”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. IV, p.42-43

Truth, Beauty, Art, Nature

“Most American officials viewed Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic as the Bosnia leader with the broadest vision - an eloquent advocate of a multiethnic state. But his power struggles with Izetbegović and Sacirbey and other members of the Bosnian government often isolated him. His collegues complained that he was difficult to work with. He carried a serious additional burden: Tuđman and Milošević distrusted him. Nevertheless, Silajzic was one of the two msot popular Muslim politicians in Bosnia, along with Izetbegović. My own feelings about Silajdzic shifted frequently. There was something touching about his intensity and energy, and his constant desire to improve himself intellectually. Although always busy, he seemed alone - his wife and son lived in Turkey. Silajdzic was the only Bosnian official who seemed genuinely to care about economic reconstruction of his ravaged land. His unpredictable moods worried us, but his support would be essential for any peace agreement.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 188

Peace, Feeling, Mood, Business

“Most effects in psychology are relatively unimportant. That is, most variables, considered in isolation, have relatively little impact on behavior. This doesn't mean… that we should all abandon psychology and become plumbers instead. The small magnitude of most effects in psychology is itself a discovery of psychology. One might argue, in fact, that it is one of the great metadiscoveries of the field. Most variables have little impact, and thus most of the phenomena studied by psychologists are products of a multiplicity of variables.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 251

Behavior, Study

“The problems we face as a world feed off of ignorance and isolation. Art is the indelibly effective medium by which to combat it. Perhaps it is time that we focus less on the art of diplomacy and more on artistic diplomacy.”

Lydia Canaan Lebanese singer-songwriter

From Diplomacy and Art http://diplomatartist.com/diplomacy-art/, a contributer article for Diplomat Artist, October 10, 2015

World, Art, Problem, Time

“The field of study [of information science ] is so wide and varied; research is necessarily restricted to accessible areas; it often (and rightly) has the practical aim of providing guidance in a specific situation, rather than searching for generalisations; the isolation of variables for investigation is often so difficult; rarely can confirmatory experiments be undertaken.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 332.

Search, Study, Science

“It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

207-8 , as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 10
The Theory of Social Revolutions,

Strong, Change, Parting

“If they (Muslim women) wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

[Private Eye, No. 1170, October 2006].

Women, Imagination, Communication, Country

“Today, our dominant international challenge is to restore the greatness of America, based on telling the truth, a commitment to peace, and respect for civil liberties at home and basic human rights around the world.
Truth is the foundation of our global leadership, but our credibility has been shattered and we are left increasingly isolated and vulnerable in a hostile world.
Without truth, without trust, America cannot flourish. Trust is at the very heart of our democracy, the sacred covenant between a president and the people.
When that trust is violated, the bonds that hold our republic together begin to weaken.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, DNC address (2004)

Hostility, People, Truth, World

“Rolling Stone: What was your headspace at the time of Superunknown? A lot of the lyrics are dark.
Cornell: I don't know if I would say I was in a particularly dark or moody headspace more than other times. I feel the lyrics have to be born from the music. Or if I had a lyrical idea, separate from Soundgarden music, I knew if it would work with the band because it tended to reflect what the music was and what the feeling of the music was – which was usually somewhat dark and somber or moody, or over-the-top, visceral, aggressive angry.
Rolling Stone: So it wasn't an especially dark time?
Cornell: No, not that I remember. No more than usual. I think that I always struggled with depression and isolation, so those could come out. I think that the mood of Seattle to me, and the way that I always interpreted that mood was something that was always a little bit introspective and dark. And I wouldn't say "depressing," but introspective in a way that could be moodier and darker.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Rolling Stone, 2014 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/soundgardens-chris-cornell-on-superunknown-depression-w483113, On depression and suicide

Music, Way, Feeling, Idea

“The external embodiment of an act is composed of many parts, and may be regarded as capable of being divided into an infinite number of particulars. An act may be looked on as in the first instance coming into contact with only one of these particulars. But the truth of the particular is the universal. A definite act is not confined in its content to one isolated point of the varied external world, but is universal, including these varied relations within itself. The purpose, which is the product of thought and embraces not the particular only but also the universal side, is intention.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right translated by SW Dyde Queen’s University Canada 1896 p. 114-115
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

Truth, World, Universe, Parting

“Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 1 Son, p 4.

“It used to be that, when something strange happened, we'd hear on the news "Police believe this is the act of an isolated nut." On the internet there are no isolated nuts; whatever kind of nut you are, you can find fifty nuts in the world exactly like you.”

Bruce Perens American computer scientist

http://blip.tv/file/get/HenrikBennetsen-InnovationGoesPublic160.mov Innovation Goes Public

World

“He who fears an isolated Queen's Pawn should give up Chess.”

Siegbert Tarrasch (1862–1934) German chess player, chess writer, and chess theoretician

As quoted in The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played : 62 Masterpieces of Chess Strategy (1965) by Irving Chernev, Game 18 : The Isolated Pawn, p. 81

Fear

“Today people live to work rather than work for a living. They have forgotten their true goal in life. Subsequently they have forgotten their dharma. There is no communication between hearts, there is no sharing. Having lost contact with other's hearts, we become totally isolated. But in truth we are not isolated islands, we are links that form one chain.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Conversation in Helsinki (2000)

Life, People, Truth, Communication

“Culture has led us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Pleasure

“There must be tough security measures. You guys isolate that and you deal with it from a human rights perspective only. We are responsible for the Egyptian people, whom I consider my own family. How could I be comfortable knowing that there could be a human rights violation against these people.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by al-Sisi responding to alleged human rights abuses at home during an interview with CNN's Erin Burnett on 21 September 2016 https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2016/9/24/sisi-egypt-is-safe-does-not-violate-human-rights/ 2016

People, Family, Guy

Quotes about isolation page 2

Quotes about isolation
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