Quotes About America

The peril we face today is not only that America might fail to live up to its promise, but that Americans might stop believing in that promise or the need to fight for it. The increasing belief on the left that this promise was always a lie, or on the right that it has always been true and has already been achieved, are two sides of the same coin.

Coastal elites" have become a kind of market-dominant minority from the point of view of America's heartland, and, as we've seen all over the developing world, market-dominant minorities invariably end up producing democratic backlash.

This is America, This vast, confused beauty, This staring, restless speed of loveliness, Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms, Making grandeur out of profusion, Afraid of no incongruities, Sublime in its audacity, Bizarre breaker of moulds, Laughing with strength, Charging down on the past, Glorious and conquering, Destroyer, builder, Invincible pith and marrow of the world, An old world remaking, Whirling into the no-world of all-colored light.

with its mixed-use buildings right up against the sidewalk, is now illegal in most municipalities. Somewhere along the way, through a series of small and well-intentioned steps, traditional towns became a crime in America. At

Thus, for example, an article in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel proclaims that this women's soccer has nothing to do with sports—a standard European reaction to women's soccer in America.47 "Typically American" were the first two words in the introduction to the article, so that the reader would know right away what to expect.

the West European media report almost nothing that they associate with America in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner. Most things engender a palpable tone of irritation, derision, annoyance, dismissal.

The fact that obesity in both Europe and America is chiefly a class-specific phenomenon—obese people disproportionately inhabit the lower rungs of the social scale on both sides of the Atlantic—appears hardly a matter for reflection and pales in comparison to the ubiquitous mention of the sole culprit: the "Americanization" of European life.

Antipathy and aversion to America thus became a solid component of the elite discourse in Europe long before the United States emerged as a global power.

Buffon argued that the New World was just that: new. This adjective brought with it positive connotations of potential, excitement, energy, but it also implied lack of maturity, development, and sophistication, a view that Europeans have shared about America to this very day. Rather

Erbring's research demonstrates that the German media liberally and regularly resort to negative stereotypes about America and Americans that they would not use in the case of reporting on any other country, certainly never on anything pertaining to Germany.

Moreover, using America and Americanization as a convenient bogeyman to garner points in an internal conflict that has nothing to do with America certainly is not confined to Germany.

America as a European obsession has a long, complex relationship, one constantly vacillating between flashes of adoration and profound antipathy.

Because so many Germans came into contact with America and Americans, Germany provided the most productive and widely read authors in Europe dealing with the New World.

Such criticisms of America and the American way of life focused specifically on countering popular myths about abundance, ease of life, and freedom, insisting that "America is anything but a paradise . . . one has to work a lot harder than in Germany to get anywhere.

The magical triangle of these three competing ethnic communities (Americans—Indians—Germans) is, of course, no accidental construction; rather, it expresses a negative, almost obsessive passion of the German people: America

The rancor against Europe in American mass public opinion is of a completely different magnitude from anti-Americanism in Europe. In American politics and society, Europe is—if anything—a sporadic and insignificant element of the public discourse.

There never was a "golden age" in which European elites genuinely liked America. To be still more precise, an era never existed in which European intellectuals and literati—European elites—viewed the United States without a solid base of resentment, or better, ressentiment.

Indeed, if one extends the "social" dimension to include the successful integration of immigrants, surely America's democracy would emerge much less defective than the alleged models of Western Europe.

But does the large presence of guns in America and their relative paucity in Europe render the former more democratic than the latter? Does the fact that some American states, such as New York and Massachusetts, have much tougher gun laws than France make them more complete democratic polities?

America's "otherness" is not accepted as such by Europeans or even considered under the rubric of that motto "Other countries—other customs." On the contrary: The American "other" serves the purpose of turning America on the whole into a laughingstock, of mocking, ridiculing, and sanctimoniously instructing America, but never viewing it as an equal on the same plane with Europe.

Above all, Marx emphasized and admired the progressiveness of bourgeois America against feudal Europe.

Domestic Manners of the Americans was an enormous success in Great Britain because the book used every stereotype of cultural inferiority and crude materialism imputed to the New World as a way of making the Old World feel better about its own identity in relation to the United States.

1836: Following his years of fighting against the Rothschilds' and their central bank in America, President Andrew Jackson finally succeeds in throwing the Rothschilds' central bank out of America, when the bank's charter is not renewed. It would not be until 1913 that the Rothschilds' would be able to set up their third central bank in America, the Federal Reserve.

American foreign policy and social policy for decades. Christian fundamentalism in America has its roots in the history of the South after the end of the Civil War.