In light of these comments, Podhoretz's revelation appears to mark the moment in his life when he began to "unlearn" what, he said, he had been educated to believe as a liberal — namely, "that it was more honorable and nobler to turn one's back on one's own and fight for others and for other things in which one had no personal stake or interest".
Arendt's proposal, by contrast, is not to turn one's back on the realm of human affairs, but to rely on two faculties inherent in action itself, the faculty of forgiving and the faculty of promising.
But to create rights from whole cloth is to turn one's back on law.
Perhaps it's best to turn one's back on the internet altogether.
It would be easy to turn one's back on the problems mathematics presents (What are numbers? How can we have the certainty about them that math reveals?).
Initially, court dances were performed facing the throne, a practice known as "fronting the state," because it was unacceptable to turn one's back on a ruler.
In pop music, it is brave to turn one's back on that easy success – even if not forever.
In the theatricalists' view, to turn one's back on naturalism was to draw inspiration from the spirit of the theatre itself.
If all social order is by its very nature unalterably corrupt and inauthentic, then the only meaningful response could be to turn one's back on it.
It has a name, "the Venetian alternative" — meaning a readiness to turn one's back on history and retreat into a perfect simulacrum of the past, not to reject modernity but to pretend it isn't happening.
It may be appealing in theory to turn one's back on a culture weighed down by possessions, to pick a little patch of earth and live in harmony with nature.
