Assorted quotes on American Politics

“America can always be counted on to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other possibilities.” Winston Churchill

“America has too much power for anyone’s good, including its own.” Timothy Garton Ash
“America is a nation built on the conviction that it is … the future for all people.” Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
“America is a work in progress: its meaning is up for grabs. Any successful US politician has to master this plasticity and mould the country’s sense of itself according to his or her own beliefs.” Dorian Lynskey
“America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“America is still sleepwalking into the future.” James Howard Kunstler
“America is the last best hope for mankind.” Abraham Lincoln
“America is unique in being a nation defined by ideas and their symbols, not by specific territory or people.” Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
“America’s problem is not with its brand – which could scarcely be stronger – but with its product.” Naomi Klein
“Americans are fighters.” Richard Posner
“Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” Robert Kagan
“Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.” Ayn Rand
“Average Americans have no realistic appreciation of how powerful their nation is.” Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
“I never met in America with any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“If you take away the belief in a greater future, you cannot explain America.” Ronald Reagan
“If you would win a man to your cause first convince him that you are his friend.” Abraham Lincoln
“In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United States.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” Richard Hofstadter
“It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” Henry Ford
“My policy is to have no policy.” Abraham Lincoln
"Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Dick Cheney
“Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.” Hunter S. Thompson
“The Americans are masters at making other people hate them.” Adnan Abu Odeh
“The bedrock of America’s global leadership is military might.” Joshua Muravchik
“The business of America is business.” Calvin Coolidge
“The eyes of all people are upon us.” John Winthrop
“The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like.” Anthony Kennedy
“The higher state to which [America] seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin.” Calvin Coolidge
“The ideas that made the American myth came out of Europe.” Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
“The purpose of the welfare state should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.” Ronald Reagan
“The story of the USA since 1787 is of a country catching up with its own constitution.” Derry Nairn
“The United Nations is an instrument to be used to advance America’s foreign policy interests, not to engage in international social work.” John Bolton
“The United States has acquired an empire, but Americans themselves lack the imperial cast of mind.” Niall Ferguson
“The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.” George Washington
“The United States is refashioning authoritarianism as a form of rapid patriotism.” Henry Giroux
“To live in America is to be beset by fear.” Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Ambrose Bierce

“We [Americans] are not a nation of truth-lovers.” Hunter S. Thompson

“We are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts.” Daniel Moynihan
“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Condoleezza Rice
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Benjamin Franklin
“We must consider that we [the US] shall be as a city upon a hill.” John Winthrop
“We pour legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it.” George Washington
“What happens in America shakes the entire world.” Jeffrey Sachs
“You cannot divorce faith from the American experience. It really is our cultural and historical DNA.” Stephen Prothero