American Exceptionalism Quotes

“Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.”
― Zbigniew Brzezinski

“The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.”
― Louis Simpson, People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-1983

“I dont know what happens to country.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...”
― Poul Anderson

“When the culture of the East, its chief characteristic, is added to the strength of body and the strength of mind of the agricultural center, its special contribution, and these two great characteristics are constantly imbued with the spirit of independence and love of liberty which lives in the hearts of the dwellers of the mountains, their main quality added to the national character, there is every reason to believe that we shall have a people and institutions such as will be permanent; with such wealth of resources, of such high education and intelligence, and of such vitality, of such longevity, of such devotion to freedom and hostility to centralization and tyranny as shall enable this Nation of ours to stand indefinitely; and to maintain in the future years its manifest destiny of leading the peoples and nations of earth in the principles of free government, constitutional security and individual liberty. Under these and under these alone, the faculties, the aspirations and inspirations of mankind may be unfolded into their full flowering to the fruition of an ever greater and more humane civilization.”
― Charles Edwin Winter, Four Hundred Million Acres: The Public Lands and Resources

“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, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“That America is an exceptional nation is unclear only to one who has not been taught its true history. It ceases to be exceptional only when its representative leaders cease to be exceptional. America, it has been said, is a nation of laws, not of men. The more it becomes a nation of men, the less it remains America.”
― Ron Brackin

“But the biggest problem with being fed lies about how great we are is that people won't be prepared for how evil this government has already been and therefore can be again.”
― Aron Ra

“Possibly, if we saw ourselves as the rest of the world does, we would stop being taken in by another manufactured scare story designed to manipulate us, and we'd actually have a chance of making much needed change in our own country.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“Moreover, the very belief that Americans had somehow discovered the ultimate answer to mankind's eternal quandaries and were now poised to establish heaven on earth was a delusion that deserved to be ranked alongside the fables about the Holy Grail and the fountain of youth. "We may boast that we are one, the chosen people,: he (Adams) warned, " and we may even thank God that we are not like other men, but, after all, it would be but flattery, delusion, the self-deceit of the Pharisee.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“And this is what [Donald] Trump has proven: beneath the surface of the American consensus, the belief in our founding fathers and the faith in our ideals, there lies another America--[Pat] Buchanan's America, Trump's America--one that sees no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship. This America feels no attachment to other democracies; this America is not "exceptional." This America has no special democratic spirit of the kind [Thomas] Jefferson described. The unity of this America is created by white skin, a certain idea of Christianity, and an attachment to land that will be surrounded and defended by a wall. This America's ethnic nationalism resembles the old-fashioned ethnic nationalism of older European nations. This America's cultural despair resembles their cultural despair.

The surprise is not that this definition of America is there: it has always existed. The surprise is that it emerged in the political party that has most ostentatiously used flags, banners, patriotic symbols, and parades to signify its identity.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“America is a post-Christian nation only in the sense that we have built a tenement on the foundation of a palace.”
― Ron Brackin

“You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to write about it.'

'Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say,' he replied guardedly.

'And then check it with York?'

'Yes.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“American Exceptionalism is a false religion.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“The real American exceptionalism is the shrinking of a protected class into an infinitesimal slice of the population, who lecture and swindle the rest of us from their gilded retreats.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The United States has a specific and certain purpose on Earth. Each American has a specific and certain purpose in America.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“The price of liberty is responsibility, and eternal vigilance.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“Only a wise, prudent, practical and just people who are spiritually evolved can be trusted to govern themselves in alignment with moral values.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“Only a good-hearted, loving, strong, and mature people can carry the burdensome weight of self-governance.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“America indeed has become a progressive nation, if we understand "progressive" to mean progressing away from God, his incomparable blessings, and the moral foundation that made America great, and advancing toward a mythical utopia where mankind is in control of mankind (think "Lord of the Flies").”
― Ron Brackin

“Although much has been written about the decline of American competitiveness, in many ways this new global market plays to our strengths. The constant in the global marketplace is change, and change is what we Americans deal with best. We have always been innovators. Who else would choose as a national motto on our great seal "novus ordo seclorum" - the new order of the ages. This native adaptability is in itself a type of "infrastructural" advantage, an infrastructure of culture that will serve us well as long as we refuse to panic in the face of statisticians and pundits wielding yesterday's numbers and telling us we're washed up if we remain ourselves.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“American exceptionalism embraces a work-centered soteriology, believing that the United States of American has earned a special status before God, attaining favor through her exceptional actions. This assumption stands in stark contrast to the humility and dependence on God revealed in the book of Lamentations.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times

“We cannot "solve" the problem of race in America while ignoring our deep and painful history. Our tendency to ignore our tainted history may arise from a warped self-perception. We do not need to deal with our tainted past because we have risen above that problematic history and moved to a postracial, colorblind America. An assumed exceptionalism belies the belief that we do not have to deal with our history because through our exceptional status we have overcome the past. The destruction of black bodes and black minds can be justified because their sacrifice helped to build our exceptional nation.”
― Soong-Chan Rah

“It is work that truly defines what it means to be an American, what separates and elevates its people above all others in the world today.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Although we may not like to hear it, proponents of the Constitution repeatedly insisted that, when it comes to our character, Americans aren't exceptional.”
― Robert Tracy McKenzie, We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy

“Found this one last year, reading an I.F. Stone book on the forgotten war, in Korea. Doubt that I've ever read a better description of what it's like to ask questions about and be fascinated by history, in a country in which we're taught to wear patriotic blinders.

"People with a built-in indifference to history are ill accustomed to retrospective digging, to lifting up rugs, to searching for subterranean forces and tendencies. Exploring the labyrinth of history is alien to the American soul, perhaps because an optimistic people find knowledge of the past too burdensome in the present." - Bruce Cumings, from the Preface of Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War ('88 edition)”
― Bruce Cumings

“All such advances require only that we live by the principles we claim to espouse but have too long ignored...”
― Patrick Smith

“For more than a century America has occupied a position of scientific leadership and has gradually come to take it for granted. Although neither war nor economic depression nor political conflict has been able to threaten it, I now fear that that is about to change, for something has arisen that may indeed signal a change in our national character. That something is most visible in the debate over evolution, but it extends far beyond the teaching of a single subject in the curriculum of a single scientific discipline. It reveals a deep and profound split in the American psyche, an unease that threatens the way we think of ourselves as a people, the place we hold for science in our lives, and the way in which we will move into the twenty-first century.
What is at stake, I am convinced, is nothing less than America’s scientific soul.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul