Michael Oren Quotes

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

You will never see President Bachmann step one toe out of the United States and apologize for this country.

America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order.

That is where American foreign policy begins—with the interest, the aspirations, and the values of the American people.

Under the George W. Bush Administration…, the United States was generally seen as having the capacity and resolve, to pursue its own agenda in complete disregard of other states’ preferences.

America must always lead on the world stage.

The United States has such an opportunity to be a leader in the world, and that opportunity has been frittered away.

Our diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. We need a frank conversation about what we stand for as that 'shining city on a hill.' And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can't do it on the cheap.

Isolationism is not leadership.

Americans, perhaps more than most people, have pondered the question of who they are and what their country is.

American people have the ability to laugh at themselves. It is one of the things that makes this country the great country that it is.

My priority is to give the United States the kind of influence it should have.

Finally we are a nation with some conscience. It means alliances are extremely important when they're based on a national interest. We have to have the ability to sustain our presence within those alliances.

There is no international problem that can be addressed or solved without the engagement and leadership of the United States and everybody in the world knows that, its just fact of life. So sometimes I think we could conduct ourselves with a little more humility.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

The whole notion of an embassy is like 'The Other.' That's what makes Washington interesting.

France will always be France no matter what, but America involves striving toward an ideal.

I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?

I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives, and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

One of the many, many salutary aspects of Barack Obama's impending presidential nomination is the sea change his victory marks in the battle for the mind-set of the American foreign policy establishment.

I don't believe America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.

Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and self-defeating.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.