National Perception Quotes

We shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power, but every other nation will think we shall abuse it.

Let's be honest. Canada wasn't ever cool.

I think it's important that the rest of the world know that we're not all the same and that we don't all have the sort of arrogance it feels like they're perceiving from our leaders.

Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier.

Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.

Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland SMALL?

That the Op-Ed page is very important in readers' and the nation's perception of the Times, the perception of its editorial positions, and of its implicit editorial positions as expressed by the publisher's choice of people who are given the freedom to write opinion columns.

The bottom line is, Texas and its people are pretty much what most people mean when they use the broader term 'America.'

For me, 'Parmanu' was an awakening of sorts. The film is about a covert mission. It's sometimes unbelievable that we get to recreate a part of history and live an incident that made history and changed the way our country was perceived.

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

Canada is not Canada. We are not the country we think we are.

In 1986, I returned to London as editor in chief of 'British Vogue.' Although I still thought of myself as totally English, to my surprise, everyone here thought I was some sort of American control freak.

Whenever I travel anywhere, I'm constantly asked if I'm Swedish. It's the burden of most Norwegians. The Swedes have just got a better publicity agent, I think.

You can't be Canadian without being aware of at least one other country, the United States, 'cause it's so important to us. I think we sometimes like to think that, you know, Americans will pay attention to us from time to time, too.

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.

The more liked you are in Washington, the less liked you are in the rest of America, and vice versa.

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

All my life, Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest, freest' country in the world. By most measurements, it was long a contender for that honor, and - among the larger countries, if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.

If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order ... If the American nation be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.