Jane Jacobs Quotes

America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself - from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence.

America is always attracting people, from all over the earth.

To the world, you are America.

I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world.

I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

I will never be able to break the hold that America has on me.

We must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is really a big world danger.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The great question of the 20th century is whether the Anglo-Saxon of the Slav is to impress his civilization upon the world.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

Capitalism is the system that has enabled greatness and made America the envy of the world.

I think America, unfortunately, collectively thinks of itself as the 'chosen people.' To my knowledge, there are no chosen people, we are all human beings.

America has an ability to try to make some things happen that other countries don't necessarily have.

Today, America has become one of the most powerful forces for good on earth. We must keep it so.

A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

Common sense, to me, is simple. And I've never understood why there aren't a lot of people trying to figure out how the United States became this special place and then try to replicate it around the world, because that's the solution to the human condition. The solution to poverty, the solution to misery, the solution to backwards living is the United States of America. Why not learn how that happened, learn why and how we happened. What is it that made it special?

No doubt, the United States and the American people are a gear country and a great people. Nobody disputes this, but talking about exceptionalism is way too much, and this is creating certain problems in relations, and not only with Russia, as I see it.

I will work every single day to make sure that America continues to be the greatest nation on earth.

American exceptionalism, in the broad sense, is not a bunch of braggadocious words people say, "Yeah, we're better people. We have a better country. We are higher class people." That's not what it is. America was the exception to the way human beings prior to America, most of which lived.

In America we have across the country, the entire world.

The greatness of America is that it produces exuberant geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. We are meant to be a jazzy people who talk big and jump on the table and dance; we aren't supposed to be dopey and glum and brood over old injuries.

The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.

America still is an exceptional country. We love to lead and we love to win. And we do it, when we take on any challenge and when we take - we support our friends.