Quotes About Americans

I think every election is sui generis. I think it starts with where we are in the country at this time, with what Americans are thinking, feeling and hoping, and it proceeds from there. And it is always about the future.

It's crazy that the Constitution has to be amended to clarify what for the majority of Americans is a clear and true statement: corporations are not people.

What we are doing in the United States is we have launched a television station for mainstream audiences, which means whether they are native Americans or people living from any part of the world.

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.

The ACA - popularly known as 'Obamacare' - has been an important step forward toward an admirable goal: providing access to health insurance for all Americans. But like many reforms generated by the political process, the ACA is problematic.

Medicare has provided healthcare coverage for older Americans and disabled persons for 50 years, and I believe that steps must be taken to ensure that it remains an option for all Americans now and into the future.

But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas—the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut—have a historical tendency to go national. Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party.

Goodwyn also warned against a politics of "individual righteousness," a tendency toward "celebrating the purity" of one's so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country's economic structure, he argued, you must practice "ideological patience," a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans.

I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

No, the bigger problem is that we're proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong about anything.

the bigger problem is that we're proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong about anything

The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they're misinformed.

This illustrates an important point: then as now, Americans tend to think about issues like macroeconomic policy or foreign affairs only when things go wrong. The rest of the time, they remain happily unaware of the policies and processes that function well everyday while the nation goes about its business.

And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones

Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication.

voters." Whether about science or policy, however, they all share the same disturbing characteristic: a solipsistic and thin-skinned insistence that every opinion be treated as truth. Americans no longer distinguish the phrase "you're wrong" from the phrase "you're stupid." To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult.

She thought of the self-help books preaching the importance of gratitude that millions of Americans bought each year. How many of them could muster gratitude for a cup of tea?

I am confident that when the role of national effort in the 1960s is written, when a judgment is rendered whether this generation of Americans took those steps . . . to make it possible for those who came after us to live in greater security and prosperity, I am confident that history will write that in the 1960s, we did our part.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

I think Americans are aware that they are involved in all sorts of violence around the world. They normally don't want to look at that.

A lot of Americans do not have an appreciation for our history. They do not understand the Constitution, why we have these norms. And at some point, yes, the media has some responsibility, but so does the public.

I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people.

I think it's very important to always make sure that you're talking to the entire coalition and to as many Americans as possible; not to go chasing after one little group or another. The Democrats would bring new groups into their party and not notice that larger groups are going out the back door.