Ferdinand Mount Quotes

The United States is a nation different from all others. We are now powerful if we choose to exert our strength.

We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort.

If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.

Our nation was created in ways that allow human potential to prosper, and it created the greatest nation for people in the history of humanity. Now Obama is dismantling it, because he has no appreciation for our greatness. In fact, he resents it. He blames this country for whatever evils he sees around the world.

Here is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastery.

Young man, I have lived in this house many years and have seen the occupants of the White House across the square come and go, and nothing you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long.

America has at one bound become a world power in a sense she never was before.

The 21st century is going to be the American century. Because we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That is the history of the journey of America.

Let us face it: in the world today, money and economic strength remain more powerful arguments than the number of people you represent.

A great nation cannot throw off the responsibilities which its past history and its position in the world have imposed upon it.

Americans tend to see U.S. primacy as beneficial to both their country and the rest of the world.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

There is not a man here [in Congress] who does not feel four hundred percent bigger in 1900—bigger intellectually, bigger, hopefully, bigger patriotically that he as a citizen of a country that has become a world power.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

[Describing the Republican Party:] ... the party of memory

The history of this country is told by showing people who have contributed to it.

A nation is a superpower not just because of its military strength.

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.

Another point of extraordinary importance is that, in all the history of Japan since the beginning, the country ‘has never once felt the shame of foreign conquest.’

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Happy is the nation without a history.

The culminating manifestation of naval force in the history of the world.

Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

The Crown as a symbol of sovereignty encourages British Canadians to ignore their own failure to build a united nation by allowing them an illusory participation in a history and a greatness not properly theirs.