National Perspective Quotes

How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.

The knowledge and experience of any local authority is but local knowledge and experience, confined to their own part of the country and its modes of management, whereas the central government has the means of knowing all that is to be learnt from the united experience of the whole kingdom, with the addition of easy access to that of foreign countries.

By focusing on the community, you can learn more about the whole country.

Rather than hearing from the city council president, you'd hear from sources all across the country.

Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant, and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.

The travel that I've spent around the country, I always come back with ideas for L.A. and vice versa: My experiences in L.A. give me an immediacy to issues that sometimes people in Washington think about but aren't experiencing every day.

In fact that is the struggle that most Americans - As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomacand that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.

When I was a kid, if you didn't speak Irish, you really wanted to. And you played Gaelic games and you didn't pay any attention to what was happening in the outside world, because really, Ireland was the center of the universe. And I don't think that's the case anymore. Although, admittedly, it is the center of the universe.

Very obviously, the electorate as a mass has not imbibed the philosophy of 'think national, act local' or even 'think big and beyond' - it is a case, more, of 'think local, act local, and let the national equation take care of itself.'

I think the country's in trouble. And I think I have a pretty clear sense of the values and principles that have made this country great. I've had a chance to govern and lead with those in mind, with some significant success in Minnesota. And I think the country needs that kind of leadership and insight and perspective.

A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not.

The most difficult place in the world to get a clear and open perspective of the country as a whole is Washington.

I'm Canadian. I think that's it. When you're a Canadian, you're always watching America from the outside, from afar.

It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in.