Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.

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

Every generation in America has faced the same question, do we we want America to be special? Or do we just want America to be another country? The time has come again.

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

The notion, the invention of a country, is fairly new in the history of mankind. We tend to forget that. We want to protect our country. The country is something that's fairly new. It's 250 years old, maybe 300 years old, so it's bound to change and evolve also. Migration is part of that.

I'm proud to be an American, I'll tell you. What a program and what a place and what an experience.

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

American is deteriorating because it is becoming like other countries

The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.

American exceptionalism, in the broad sense, is not a bunch of braggadocious words people say, "Yeah, we're better people. We have a better country. We are higher class people." That's not what it is. America was the exception to the way human beings prior to America, most of which lived.

The majority of Western culture came out of Europe, which is not comparable to America. It came out of nation states based on geographical and ethnic foundations. America is based on principles, a very different kind of country.

To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

When did America forget that it's America?

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

Diversity hasn't a thing to do with why this country is great. Diversity is not a factor in any way when defining or explaining America's greatness.

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

One thing that America is objectively exceptional at is overreacting whenever anyone accuses them of not being exceptional.