Elaine Sciolino Quotes

I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.

The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the 'Voice of America' and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity.

I'm from Canada, and I think, like everyone growing up anywhere else in the world, you are very aware of America - it sort of looms large in its legend, and so did Detroit.

I talk about my dad and the American dream, and I just want to say to Americans how fascinated we are by America. We would love Americans to look at the rest of the world that way sometimes.

I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am. Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America.

It's probably more frustrating to me as an Iranian living in America than it is when I'm over there. Inside Iran, people are actually quite well educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true. There's a lack of knowledge about Iran and the Iranian people.

Indeed, often because of the size and weight in the world of our neighbor, we in Canada often define ourselves in contrast to American positions on things like Cuba, the Vietnam War and nuclear disarmament. Historically, Canada has not always been aligned with the United States. It doesn't necessarily serve anyone's interests - Canadian or American - to be seen as an extension of the United States.

The world is looking to us for leadership. We have provided it in the past; the main reason why anti-American feelings are so strong in the world today is that we are not providing it in the present.

The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

Realizing that we can not live unto ourselves alone, we have contributed of our resources and our counsel to the relief of the suffering and the settlement of the disputes among the European nations. Because of what America is and what America has done, a firmer courage, a higher hope, inspires the heart of all humanity.

Our mistakes, blunders, flaws, and shortcomings notwithstanding, the world America made after 1945 and 1989 has enjoyed the longest period of general peace in the west since Roman times, and decades of prosperity.

When we export energy, we export American influence overseas. As I travel around the world, I know that there are people that want to buy energy from America.

I am the last man in the world to say that the succor which is given us from America is not in itself something to rejoice at greatly. But I also say that I can see more in the knowledge that America is going to win a right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are discussed. . . . It would have been a tragedy for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all her influence and power.

No nation in the world has had greater fortune than mine in sharing a continent with the people and the nation of Canada.

The United States is not longer going to be the world's policemen and our days of determining you're in or you're out around the world no matter what the level of direct American interest or connection are going to be very limited. Increasingly, Africa will be doing that.

Because in Australia we're so inundated with American culture, television, this that and the other, everyone in Australia can do an American accent. It's just second nature.

I would just want to wish President Obama the best of luck, and that he should bear in mind that just as he is a good person, there are many of us presidents in Latin America who are also good people.

You can't be Canadian without being aware of at least one other country, the United States, 'cause it's so important to us. I think we sometimes like to think that, you know, Americans will pay attention to us from time to time, too.

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

In Cancún, I felt like I had walked into an American teen movie.

I would not presume from this distance, nor would America presume to say who should be the leader of the Iraqi nation.

With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.

In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.

You know why the French hate us so much? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into our croissandwich, thank you very much.

After the Cold War, to rally the American people to understand that we had to be a part of solutions. It's one thing to say that we have to run everything, it's another to say we don't want anything to do with it.