Perception of America Quotes

I thought of America as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue.

I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

I became an American in 2006. It got me thinking about what is my America and what's my perception of America.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

Democrats believed in "progressivism." They believed in Big Government. But they at least attached optimistic outcomes to it. They really believed they were helping America. They really believed they were helping families, helping people. Now they've just become, "The country's horrible, it's rotten, it needs to be reformed!" The liberals of John F. Kennedy's day did not think there was anything really major wrong with this country.

If you ask every American out there what kind of a people we are, we would all say, "Oh, we're really good people. We do good things in the world." Then you go around the world and ask what America is like, there's a completely different conceptualization of what we are.

[My vision of America is] a good vision. Actually the best is on TV. I wanted to shoot all the pictures off the TV. No one would have known the difference.

I've seen foreigners really shift on their view of America, and that's hard for me to take.

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.