Jean Baudrillard Quotes

In true Hollywood fashion the US expounds its interests and power in the world as the triumph of good over evil. The media dismisses any ambiguity in a truly complex world. Instead America's propagandists hand down the Manichean dichotomy - "us and them," "good and bad," "those who are for us and those who are against us.

I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.

Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa.

Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.

The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon.

But, actually, it is only Americans who say that our freedoms and prosperity are the reason foreigners hate us. If you ask the foreigners, they make it clear that it's America's bullying foreign policy they detest.

The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.

New England is the home of all that is good and noble with all her sternness and uncompromising opinions.

The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America's interests.

What does the doctrine of American exceptionalism empower the United States to do? Nothing more than to act better than traditional empires - committed to looting and conquest - have done. So that's American exceptionalism: an exceptionalism based on noble ideas, ideas that it holds itself to even when it falls short of them.

We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.

I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world.

It is our manifest destiny to lead and rule all nations.

Annexation [of Mexico] … because the United States is destined to supplant all other governments on this continent [and] … leading Mexico to a higher plane of civilization.

We are destined to own and control the whole western continent from Baffin's bay to the Caribbean sea ... we need not be in a hurry. When the fruit is ripe, it will fall into our hands.

It [aviation] is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe, one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.

There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.

Americans do not recognize the effect of American power in the world. … People all over the world ask, “Why can’t Americans see how American power affects us?”

The American conception that liberty’s task was to oppose concentrated power, produced a sense that the country had a mission to reshape the world in form much like its own, and enlarged a conviction that America was God’s country, with an exceptional and newly chosen people.

America's militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history.

The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might.

If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America's power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we've been.

That's the problem with the United States. It believes it can control everybody's behavior.