Quotes About Insularity

Empirical studies show that New Zealanders are the most widely traveled people on the planet. The computer and the Internet have made a major difference. Insularity, distance, and isolation may have been important in an earlier period of New Zealand's history, but not today. The rapid progress of communications has wrought a revolution in the spatial condition of New Zealand, and yet its culture remains very distinctive. This fact suggests that distance itself is not the key.

On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy's vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

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.

There's no doubt in my mind that people on the West Coast - L.A. particularly - and the East Coast have no clue at all about what's happening outside their own little bailiwick. And they think everybody is stupid because they are not sophisticated.

Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe.

Italian Roseto. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and it might well have

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

Employees in large, older firms often have difficulty getting a transformation process started because of the lack of leadership coupled with arrogance, insularity, and bureaucracy.

The more you get set into your own world, the smaller your world becomes.

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.

C.I.A. had "a culture of insularity." The attitude they projected was "Nobody should tell us what to do. We got it. We are special

In Los Angeles, individuality is very big, because people live in secluded bubbles. People don't walk around. They're very insular, and that allows for people to be whatever they want.

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.

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.

All societies that have tried to keep themselves 'pure,' from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

I've always felt like I work in a small little area that doesn't represent anything like the rest of society.

Insularity, like empire-building, requires superb self-confidence, a conviction of one's moral superiority. An English caricature of an Indian - possessive towards people with power, arrogant to those with none. Through a narrow Moghul arch into a dark stone corridor - the kind in which you feel the weight of India: a heavy darkness which is a protection from glare and heat but reminiscent of tombs and dungeons.

Partnering across neighborhoods in the city or county exposes areas of insularity and opens the door for reconciliation, collaboration and innovation.

It's alright," they say, "Of course, there's beauty there," but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the farawayness of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them for their disregard of the Brits' role in the colonial tragedy of my country.

Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion.