Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
As polarized as we have been, we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country.
Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.
On the contrary, I tried on numerous occasions to convince the American president not to go to war. I did what was within my capabilities to avoid that happening.
The dramatic wish of Romanians at the end of the Second World War was to be occupied by the Americans and not by the Russians.
Conventional wisdom holds that setting a timetable for getting American troops out of Iraq would be a mistake.
This was all an excuse, I think. I was doing fine. I had a 93 average and I was holding my head above water. I had good friends and a loving family. And because I needed to be the center of attention, because I needed something more, I ended up here,...
Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million ye...
[last lines] Henry Hill: [narrating] Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I'd either blow the winnings in a week or go to the shark...
It seems as if Americans like to be the center of attention even after they're dead.
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
He never realized how noisy American silence was until all the gadgets died.
If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.
Global political conditions make a direct American intervention difficult, but President Reagan's messianic and visceral attitude toward the Nicaraguan revolution could mean it will happen as an act of desperation.
If you eat something and get fat, you should be responsible for it. I think that is the attitude of the great majority of Americans, that you should be responsible for what you eat.
Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.
Compassion is not defined in one form. There's no Indian compassion. There's no American compassion. It transcends nation, the gender, the age. Why? Because it is there in everybody. It's experienced by people occasionally.
Starting a new retirement plan for those below a certain age is something tens of millions of Americans have already been through at work.
For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.
I share the anger, but, ultimately, to govern this country, it takes more than anger. It takes experience. It takes positions that reflect the best values of the American people.
Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.
