J. Michael Straczynski Quotes

After Bush was elected in 2004 - please note that I didn't say 're-elected' - and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who'd grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

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?

Americans disagree about America because the most common consensus as to what America is or has ever been or ever was meant to be eludes us, and it eludes us because we want it to.

Each generation of Americans must define what it means to be an American.

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

To me, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and my identity is of a suburban Chicago person. It's not like, 'Oh, I'm Indian.' I'm not. I'm American.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

I just wanted it to be American.

I don't like identity. We accept identities in Israel. We make them holy. But what does identity really mean?

Some call me a Cuban hyphen American. I reject that. I don't believe in hyphenated Americans.

It's important to be really verbal about what you believe, to try to claim America as your own, as we're trying to figure out the identity of this country and what we're going to be.

I feel like we're in the era now where politics is pop culture. Everybody has an opinion that's politically based. We see what the Trump administration has done, and I've never seen my culture this engaged in the political process.

I'm sure there's some sort of cynicism or fatalism in Ireland and England. We are fatalistic here, and sometimes we need to be shaken out of that.

One of the things that we've got to understand... is that politics of identity has never gone away. And where people have had a strong identity, geographically, culturally, in terms of their employment... if that's gone and not being replaced by something else, then I think the right-of-centre's got to wake up to that.

The U.S. has always understood itself to be united around political principles and not around culture, whereas the nations of Europe have a much more traditional conception of nationhood that is connected to romanticism, which thinks of religion and culture as ingredients of nationhood.

'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

We must start pushing back against this politically correct nonsense that's destroying our society and culture.

Sometimes I struggle with being American.

I think, at the end of the day, we're Americans: that's what we are, and we believe in America.

I've always had a complex relationship towards my identity as an American.

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

Europe's greatest problem is cultural relativism. This has led to a situation where Europeans no longer know what they should be proud of and who they really are because a so-called liberal and leftist-imposed concept says that all cultures are the same.

I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don't know why he chose to write it, but I'm glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can't become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.