Le Mai Quotes

We must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is really a big world danger.

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.

You Americans, you have no idea how much your stuff infiltrates the rest of the world!

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

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

Based on all criteria - military power, economic influence, cultural dominance - America remains number one, even though other, new players are increasingly challenging it in that role.

Yes, I would agree that America, just like Spain was in the 17th Century, is the main empire of the world and they are the ones who, on the surface, are the most pushy: pushing their language, pushing their culture - or what there is of it - pushing by force their system on others.

Every citizen in every country in the world now grows up in two nations. Their own and Hollywood.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

I have found that many other countries will buy off on anything American. As much as they hate us, they want to be us more than anything.

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

Hollywood ... proved a more reliable, cost-effective means of securing world domination than any nuclear arsenal or diplomatic d’marche.

Americans tend to see U.S. primacy as beneficial to both their country and the rest of the world.

Whereas the British were generally quite open about the fact that they were running an empire, few Americans politicians today would use the “e” word as anything other than a term of abuse.

The World Doesn’t Want to Be American

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

America is different. It irks and domineers. But it does not conquer. It tries to call the shots and bend the rules, but it does not go to war for land and glory.

Culturally, America is the undisputed hegemonic power.

[The United States] dreams of world domination, resolves to control the resources of other nations, wants to shape the world according to its ideas, and seeks to impose its values and ideology on others by force.