America

Knut Andersen (in The Atlantic, August 2017) - Being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.

Knut Andersen (in The Atlantic, August 2017) - America has mutated into Fantasyland. (...) By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Isaac Asimov (in Newsweek, 21 January 1980) - There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Abba Eban (March 1967) often wrongly attributed to Sir Winston Churchill - Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.

Samuel Huntington (in Who Are We?, 2004) - The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

Henry Kissinger - The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Thomas Palley - Americans tend to disregard history. Henry Ford declared bluntly, “History is bunk,” while Gore Vidal calls the U.S. “the United States of Amnesia.”

Mort Sahl (1987) - Washington couldn't tell a lie, Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and Reagan couldn't tell the difference.

Mort Sahl - You haven't lived until you've died in California.

Bill Seidman (FDIC Chairman) - You never know what the American public is going to do, but you know that they will do it all at once.

Beppe Severgnini - The differences between Italians and Americans are quattro grandi C (four big C’s):

• • cambiamento (change),

  • controllo (control),

  • concorrenza (competition)

  • and coreografia (choreography).

Beppe Severgnini - Competition in America is more than a healthy economic precept; it’s a moral imperative.

Attributed to John Steinbeck - Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

US Department of Education (in A Nation at Risk, 1983) - If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

Traditional - War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.