Exceptional Nation Quotes & Sayings

Americans consider the United States an exceptional nation; so do the Chinese people think of their Middle Kingdom. — Patrick Mendis

The Dreyfus Affair is an exceptional case. It's true that here and there you can find some dregs of anti-Semitism, but the situation is the same in every country. After all, you're not exactly a nation like all the other nations. You are unique, if only because you are such an ancient people, and because of the way you are spread all over the world and your obvious success in many fields. But, in all honesty, anti-Semitism in France has always remained on a minimal level, at the verbal level only. It never went as far as pogroms. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

It's a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place. — Paul Ryan

Values are most important. Democratic values have to be instilled from childhood and the child sees at an early stage in life in every situation in society. — Ela Bhatt

Here, in the Land of Israel, we returned and built a nation. Here, in the Land of Israel, we established a State. The Land of the prophets, which bequeathed to the world the values of morality, law and justice, was after two thousand years, restored to its lawful owner - the members of the Jewish People, On its Land, we have built an exceptional national Home and State. — Yitzhak Rabin

American exceptionalism? Exceptional at what? Waging wars against innocent people for fake reasons? Exceptional at what? Being addicted to pharmaceutical drugs that have people's minds wasted? Exceptional at what? Eating more junk food and becoming the most obese nation on Earth? — Gerald Celente

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. — Barack Obama

Yes, impossible. But do not dread, impossibility is just another measure of difficulty. The skills of dwargens and flillows sometimes match the impossible ... - Dwenzuak the dwargen — T. William Watts

One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the 'high school movement' made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education — Paul Krugman

Learn to trust yourself and you will create a meaningful life. — Lynn A. Robinson

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

America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mass culture is Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. — Chris Hedges

Thanks to superior organization, the Egyptian armed forces scored a dual victory, on land and sea, over that second alliance. The fleet of the "Peoples of the North" was entirely destroyed and the invasion route through the Delta was cut. At the same time a third coalition of the same white-skinned Indo-Aryans was being assembled, again in Libya, against the Black Egyptian nation. Yet, this was not a racial conflict in the modern sense. To be sure, the two hostile groups were fully conscious of their ethnic and racial differences, but it was much more a question of the great movement of disinherited peoples of the north toward richer and more advanced countries. Ramses III demolished that third coalition as he had destroyed the first two.... As a result of this third victory over the Indo-Aryans, he took an exceptional number of prisoners. — Cheikh Anta Diop

In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest. — Andre Malraux

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet — George Orwell

Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying. — Yoko Ono

The power of intention is a critical factor in all areas of life. Simply by intending to create synchronicity in your life, you can nurture that result. — Deepak Chopra

I'm crepuscular. — Christopher Hitchens

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? — Harold Edmund Stearns

You see, as Americans we're not defined by class, and we will never be told our place. What makes our nation exceptional is that anyone, from any background, can climb the highest of heights. — Rick Perry

If you can see yourself doing something, you can do it. If you can't see yourself doing it, usually you can't achieve it. — David Goggins

There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide. — Len G. Murray

America is still the land of opportunity for most, but it is not a land of opportunity for all. If we are to remain an exceptional nation, we must close this gap in opportunity. — Marco Rubio

President Obama has made it his mission that we welcome our troops home with care and concern and the respect they deserve. That is how an exceptional nation says thank you to its most exceptional men and women. — John F. Kerry

Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics. — Michael Ignatieff

Maybe it's not a lesson so much as it's a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that's left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you're lucky. If that's what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what's said to you, doing what's done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you're all alone you keep on cawing hello pretty bird at the dark. — Catherynne M Valente

We shall always be a small minority in the world, but, when a small nation accomplishes something with its limited means, what it achieves has an immense and exceptional value, like the widow's mite. It is a deliberate and discerning love of a nation that appeals to me, not the indiscriminate love that assumes everything to be right because it bears a national label. Love of one's own nation should not entail non-love of other nations. Institutions by themselves are not enough. — Tomas Garrigue Masaryk