Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

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.

The House of Representatives is the center of power of the most powerful nation in the world.

We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.

A great nation cannot throw off the responsibilities which its past history and its position in the world have imposed upon it.

Americans tend to see U.S. primacy as beneficial to both their country and the rest of the world.

[America should be a] nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social compact.

There is not a man here [in Congress] who does not feel four hundred percent bigger in 1900—bigger intellectually, bigger, hopefully, bigger patriotically that he as a citizen of a country that has become a world power.

From the start, the nation’s history has been weighted with a sense of great destiny and huge meaning, of visions not found on the fringes of the story but at its very core, actively shaping the minds of those who make history and those who write about it.

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.

When your country is number one, others watch and emulate you. You do not study and emulate others.

Power is the true reserve currency in international affairs.

It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.

The United States is a nation different from all others. We are now powerful if we choose to exert our strength.

We have a President, perhaps for the very first time since the founding of our republic, who doesn't appear to believe that America is the greatest earthly force for good the world has ever known.

You have this special place - America, you want it to remain special, you better find out why it became special.

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused - preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

America is, and always will be, a shining city on a hill.

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.

I'm proud to be an American, I'll tell you. What a program and what a place and what an experience.

Why do people like America? They say, well, you have the largest military in the world. Because you have more people, et cetera. They like America for what we stand for. And one of the things, and I feel proud to be, what this president's for, the last seven years, is we have once again aligned our basic fundamental beliefs and principles with our conduct. And it matters. It matters in terms of our security. It matters in terms of our ability to influence the world. It matters in our ability to succeed.

This myth that America has this atomic bomb that makes us right, it makes us good, it makes us set the agenda for the world. Everywhere, we can go global, we determine.

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 the greatest nation in the history of the world. There's nothing like America.

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam... These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world.