Shashi Tharoor Quotes

While The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it is also the most detested nation that the world has ever known.

I'm interested in what it means to be an American. I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is.

The reality, sitting ten thousand miles away, is that we remain the country that inspires. We remain that shining city on a hill.

The U.S has acquired reservoirs of goodwill around the globe over many years. But it is clear - from polling data and ample anecdotal evidence - that America is losing its allure in much of the world.

I'm in England so often I haven't really left, but Americans aren't at all like they're misrepresented through their politicians.

I have found that many other countries will buy off on anything American. As much as they hate us, they want to be us more than anything.

The image of one country and its people amongst peoples of another country is largely created and sustained by the media.

America had one idea attached to its brand. We presented ourselves as the world's last superpower. And that was the world's worst branding idea.

How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue allowed such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual coin of the realm overseas?

A superpower does not have to be the bully on the block.

Americans like to think of their country as the most powerful in the world, and so it has been for three-quarters of a century. But being the most powerful is a far cry from being omnipotent.

People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.

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

As the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, our president is more than a list of policies. They set the tone of our national character.

We are not a superpower like the U.S. We are a small and neutral country.

My problem is that I'm negative - I come from Romania. Romanians are a little bit negative in thinking. Everyone knows that. That's normal here.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

Our status as a land of equal opportunity has made us a rich and powerful nation, but it has also transformed lives. It has given people like me the chance to grow up knowing that no dream was too big and no goal out of reach.

I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.

When the nations of the world look upon the United States, they see a country which has achieved what they would all like to become one day. Whether it is in the field of science, art, music, agriculture, politics, economics or war, the United States is the leader.

We're Americans. I don't consider us to be evil, I just don't think we know any better. We're a really young culture. We're hillbillies, and the rest of the world sees us that way. I travel all over the world, and probably the only worse rednecks than us are the Australians. And they're an even younger country.

In the period after the Second World War, there were still leaders in Europe who represented weak countries, but possessed a sense of global foreign policy. Nowadays, on the other hand, there are politicians who represent pretty powerful countries, but whose citizens are not prepared to sacrifice themselves for the state.

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.

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.

The latest research on social mobility showed that there's a large aggregate decline in the U.S. in your chances of earning more than your parents. But I think where the story becomes more optimistic one is that there are pockets of America, where children from low-income families have significant chances of rising up in the income distribution. This finding of big geographic variation is an encouraging one because it shows that there are places where we see the American Dream thriving and we simply need to understand how can we replicate those successes elsewhere throughout the country.