National Complacency Quotes

If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers - normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security.

I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us - dollars and all.

America slept because most Americans preferred it that way.

I feel we are so blessed to live in a country where we enjoy so many rights that other countries cannot even begin to imagine. However, it terrifies me that we seem to have lost touch with our connection to the earth. I am concerned that we have risen to such heights of arrogance in our refusal to acknowledge that our earth is rapidly changing in ways that might affect us catastrophically but instead, we hold steadfast to our belief that nothing can happen to us as a people.

A tired nation, said David Lloyd George, is a Tory nation, and the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory.

Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.

We peer so suspiciously at each other that we cannot see that we Canadians are standing on the mountaintop of human wealth, freedom and privilege.

A country soon tires of the glories it has wrought.

Unless confronted by an immediate, visible, or uncomfortable crisis, our nation's tendency is to take the security of the Western Hemisphere for granted.

The negative aspects of Scottish Nationalism are a kind of aggressive complacency, that sort of boasting; but that's an expression of insecurity, I think, of a lack of confidence.