Americanism Quotes

The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his. ~ Edgar Lee Masters

True Americanism recognizes the enormous gravity of the social and labor problems which confront us. ~ Henry Cabot Lodge

There is one tradition in America I am proud to inherit. It is our first freedom and the truest expression of our Americanism: the ability to dissent without fear. It is our right to utter the words, I disagree. We must feel at liberty to speak those words to our neighbors, our clergy, our educators, our news media, our lawmakers and, above all, to the one among us we elect President. ~ Natalie Merchant

The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock. ~ Oscar Straus

What I'm trying to do is get this message out about self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism - the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2,000th time on the lightbulb. ~ Glenn Beck

True Americanism is practical idealism. Its aims, instead of being materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. In this way, the U.S. can provide and express ideals that strike a chord in humans everywhere - a declaration of independence on behalf of all the peoples of the world. ~ Maurice Saatchi

In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites. ~ Jean Francois Revel

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world, ~ Margaret Drabble

Cherokee's American, Ned. It don't get more American than that. ~ Loren D. Estleman

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause - and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled. ~ Joseph R. McCarthy

We should harbor no nostalgic regrets over the loss of this easy compatibility between 'Christianity' and 'Americanism'. It was, after all, a cultural Christianity - not a biblical one - that served the political interests of an emerging world power. ~ Michael Babcock

During most of my life, my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight. I gave little thought to their problems, save in asking myself, from time to time, whether we were showing by our lives due appreciation of the opportunities which this hospitable country affords. My approach to Zionism was through Americanism. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

Cheap anti-Americanism will eventually have consequences. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

A fine pickle we are in." "A fine pickle? An Americanism?" "Yes. Ten years there and my language is polluted. ~ Kristen Callihan

Rejecting predatory capitalism in America is a way to respect and honor America. ~ Bryant McGill

This American system of ours,call it Americanism,call it capitalism,call it what you will,gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and make the most of it. ~ Al Capone

How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made? ~ Dan Savage

The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Americans cannot comprehend how their fellow countrymen could not love their country. But the left's anti-Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the right of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and Communists. They instinctively root for anarchy against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason. ~ Ann Coulter

Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. ~ Ian McDonald

The journalist Walter Lippmann identified in Henry Ford, for all his peculiarity, a common strain of "primitive Americanism." The industrialist's conviction that he could make the world conform to his will was founded on a faith that success in economic matters should, by extension, allow capitalists to try their hands "with equal success" at "every other occupation." "Mr. Ford is neither a crank nor a freak," Lippmann insisted, but "merely the logical exponent of American prejudices about wealth and success. ~ Greg Grandin

The essential qualities of a true Pan Americanism must be the same as those which constitute a good neighbor; namely, mutual understanding, and through such understanding, a sympathetic appeciation of the other's point of view. It is only in this manner that we can hope to build up a system of which confidence, friendship, and good will are the cornerstones ... ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Once enough Americans reacquaint themselves with Americanism, we should promote it to all countries just as the Left promotes leftism and Muslims promote Islam. One need not be American to affirm Americanism. ~ Dennis Prager

Americanism consists in utterly believing in the principles of America. ~ Woodrow Wilson

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America's cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their 'work' they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudo-spirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as 'advanced' as any Sixties radical. ~ Roger Kimball

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism. ~ Malcolm X

Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

To shut one's door while others suffer, to care only for one's own, disclaiming responsibility for humanity, is to destroy all good impulse and to build up a deadly selfishness which will be a boomerang in its effect upon ourselves. Let our own children see the opportunity now theirs for Americanism in the best and traditional sense. There was never a better hour than this to be an American. May 1940, Christian Herald. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Hence from all we have hitherto said, it is clear beloved Catholics that we cannot approve the opinions which some [Protestants, Jews, and other heretics] comprise under the head of Americanism [freedom]. ~ Pope Leo XIII

Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Just war theory has been converted into a form of apologetics for whatever atrocities your favored state is carrying out. ~ Noam Chomsky

What is quite worrisome is the absence of analysis and reflection. Take the word "terrorism." It has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of the United States, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being unpatriotic. That's an unacceptable series of equations. ~ Edward Said

When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism ~ Sinclair Lewis

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists. ~ Arundhati Roy

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream--I see an American nightmare. ~ Malcolm X

I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together? ~ Adolf Hitler

There's nothing new about European anti-Americanism. To go to a dinner party of intellectuals in Paris in 1960 was like walking into a tiger's den with a piece of raw meat in your hands. ~ Charles McCarry

If Fascism comes to America it would be on a program of Americanism. ~ Huey Long

It is easy to dismiss the world as 'irrelevant,' or consumed by 'paranoid anti-Americanism,' but perhaps not wise. ~ Noam Chomsky

the platitudes of Americanism were horseshit. Number one, they didn't work. Number two, they weren't true. Number three, the people giving voice to them didn't believe them either. ~ Joseph Heller

National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism. ~ Victor Klemperer

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians. ~ Tiffany Madison

First, we should become informed about communism, about socialism, and about Americanism. What better way can one become informed than by first studying the inspired words of the prophets and using that as a foundation; against which to test all other material. This is in keeping with the Prophet Joseph Smith's motto, "When the Lord commands, do it." ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Those who hated the crimes of Pinochet closed their eyes when the same crimes were committed by Castro. The posture of many countries was governed by their hostility against the United States, and they excused Castro out of a reflexive anti-Americanism. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend.) These political games still take place today. ~ Armando Valladares

I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that. ~ Bernhard Schlink

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else ~ Theodore Roosevelt

My body has never been to Europe. My mind has never left it. ~ Brian Spellman

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome. ~ Ian Buruma

Americanism is not a matter of skin or color. ~ Daniel Inouye

Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others. ~ Samantha Power

This American system of ours', he shouted, 'call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands, and make the most of it'. A month later in New York I was telling this story to Mr John Walter, minority owner of The Times. He asked me why I had not written the Capone interview for the paper. I explained that when I had come to put my notes together, I saw that most of what Capone had said was in essence identical with what was being said in the leading articles of The Times itself, and I doubted whether the paper would be best pleased to find itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago. ~ Claud Cockburn

The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naive political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come. ~ Roger Kimball

Americanism demands loyalty to the teacher and respect for his lesson. ~ Bainbridge Colby

I'm an American, our names don't mean shit. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Americanism: Using money you haven't earned to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like. ~ Robert Quillen

Some persistent critics of the United States would argue that the country had brought this on itself. They would blame, among other things, self-serving Middle East policies, attitudes of cultural supremacy, and a steadfast disregard for growing global disparities in wealth and opportunity. Obama's own statements hinted at this. But it was apparent to most that the attacks were rooted in something darker. Washington's global strategies, intrigues, and alliances stirred anger in many parts of the world, particularly the Middle East. Anti-Americanism was real and dangerous. But this . . . this went to some deep well of hatred. ~ Mark Bowden

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I wrote Dreams of My Mothers because it reveals deep insight into a topic - cross boarder, cross racial adoption - that rarely gets much attention from any quarter, because it represents such a niche subset of our society, but contains within it nearly all the most deeply felt – and held – human themes, passions, values, insecurities, and judgments. And loves. ~ Joel L.A. Peterson