Philipp Meyer Quotes

I think America is a new country. It is a young culture. The spirit of the opening of the West is still with the Americans. It's a very practical and individual-based kind of philosophy that had worked in America for a long time, had been very successful. And the spirit is very much there.

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.

The West is the most American part of America....

What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.

In Americana, the facts and the dreams seem to be all the same to me.

Had it not been for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States would never have been the Land of Promise.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

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

The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.

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

The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.

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

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

We, the people. Manifest Destiny. Conceived in liberty. Fear itself. Ask not. Morning in America. United we stand. Yes, we can. In times of great change and tumult, presidents seek to inspire beleaguered Americans by reminding them of their national identity.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation's narrative.

Part of the western movement is this desire that we, Americans, have to keep pressing on.

I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.

When we think of the myth of the settling of the West, this is our creation myth. But because we think of it as mythology, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.

America is the sum of all our journeys as we search for our national community and our national culture.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act.

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?

And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world.