The American Idea

America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos. (Max Lerner)

Where liberty dwells, there is my country. (Benjamin Franklin)

I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress. (Alexis de Tocqueville)

America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. (Abraham Lincoln)

Americans always try to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else. (Winston Churchill)

America is God’s crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! The real American has not yet arrived.  He is only in the crucible, I tell you – he will be the fusion of all races. (Israel Zangwill)

Sometimes people call me an idealist.  Well, that is the way I know I am an American.  America is the only idealistic nation in the world. (Woodrow Wilson)

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. (John Gunther)

I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets. (Jose Luis Borges)

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What is the American Idea?

It’s the fractious, maddening approach to the conduct of human affairs that values equality despite its elusiveness, that values democracy despite its debasement, that values pluralism despite its messiness, that values institutions of civic culture despite their flaws, and that values public life as something higher and greater than the sum of all our private lifes. (The Editors of The Atlantic Monthly)

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