Cultural Optimism Quotes

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.

The beauty of America is that the average person always thinks she is above average.

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

American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.

When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.

Some people grew up in the '70s, powerful, beautiful memories of the '70s which to me is one of the worst decades. It has something to do with that. Has something to with the birth of rock 'n' roll, and something to do with those American cars. an incredible design. There was so much optimism at that time and it must leak into the process.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

I think Americans, more so than any other culture, love second and third acts.

It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.

Around 2008 was a really special time culturally. There were a lot of cool things going on in music, in fashion, politically. It was a really hopeful time and a really creative time.

Some societies are also more optimistic than others: the U.S. and Australia are my two picks Tell a European you think there’s a housing bubble and you’ll have a reasonable discussion. Tell an Australian and you’ll have World War III. Been there, done that!

[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.

In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.