Billy Corgan Quotes

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

It is rather the nature of America - our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive - what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

In France they don't think I'm difficult.

I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

French people are strange about America, I think.

Measuring success in cultural diplomacy - the use of education, creative expression in any form, or people-to-people exchange to increase understanding across regions, cultures, or peoples - is challenging. How does one quantify changes in attitude, abandoning stereotypes, or feeling empathy as a result of a performance, a film, a book?

It's almost as if people think that in Latin America we're not hip to what's happening here.

We should not check American ideals at the door when we engage in discussions with other nations.

You may as well know that one American national trait which irritates many Americans and must be convenient for our critics is that we relentlessly advertise our imperfections.

I started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel's political importance, that encouraging a nation's citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered.

It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.

For so long, Arab culture has been misconceived by the western mindset as exotic, or more recently, as dangerous, so spaces like Mathaf are vital for asserting a sense of connectedness.

I understand more when I travel why people believe that the French are arrogant.

My only experience with American things is through movies.

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.

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.

I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great

I think that Danish people may be thought off as the happiest people, but honestly...I love America.

If you ask every American out there what kind of a people we are, we would all say, "Oh, we're really good people. We do good things in the world." Then you go around the world and ask what America is like, there's a completely different conceptualization of what we are.

It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America - in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles.

People say I'm America's worst nightmare. I say I'm the American dream.

In Western Europe, Turkey is regarded as uncivilized, so they can't come in into the European Union until they're civilized. I think it's the other way around. If you could achieve the level of civilization of, say, Turkish intelectuals, it would be quite an achievement.

America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.

A lot of liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism, but it doesn't mean they don't love America.