American Mindset Quotes

The Americans' 'open-mindedness', which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their 'individualism'. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

You aren’t quite serious in America yet. You haven’t got the war right under your chins.

I have a very great respect for Americans, and having been a correspondent in this country, and I believe that Americans are people who respond much better to facts and truthful, genuine speculation, than they do to purely, kind of phoney, adulation.

What distinguishes Americans from many people in the world is our kind of endemic optimism.

Americans get very simple explanations of what happens to them.

He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.

Maybe something that amuses the Americans is that they are so worried about age, and I'm not at all.

I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.

Americans tend to believe that every problem has some technical solution.

I know very few Americans, though I like the way they think. They think big.

I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.