Alice Duer Miller Quotes

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.

I dislike loud-mouthed patriots who suggest they like our country more than I do. Some people's idea of patriotism is hating other countries.

American ideals are superior to countries all across the world.

The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own.

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism--the idolatry of the 20th century.

I think there is an American attitude that is very hard to break which is "We're great. Who wouldn't want to be like us? Who wouldn't want to have the benefits of our largesse, handing out aid and having American companies based in their countries?" and "our culture is great," and all that. It's hard for us to imagine ourselves as not being the greatest country on earth.

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

Every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.: That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

I really don't feel any strong allegiance to any country.

We have an idea that we Americans are God's chosen people, that God loves us more than any other people, and that we are God's blessed. I tell you that God doesn't love us any more than He does the Russians.

All of nationalism can be understood as a kind of collective narcissism.

National pride may be a valuable possession, but when it becomes consciousness of racial superiority it ceases to be an Imperial virtue.

I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in in Greek exceptionalism.

South Korean public opinion is still sometimes xenophobic and chauvinistic—an expression of the country’s long-held resentment of being a proverbial “shrimp among whales”.

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.

In my eyes, a patriot is little more than an international blackleg.

Have you ever noticed how hell-bent liberals are at making the United States seem inferior to other countries... to any country?

The single most important impediment to global institutions is the concept of "my country, right or wrong".

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and "patriotism" . . . Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.