National Characteristics Quotes

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.

Captain America is an interesting character because it makes you ask those questions in yourself as a writer. What do we want as a nation, what do we mean as a nation, what is our role in the world as a nation? What are our strengths and weaknesses as a country?

With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

I think Canadians are great satirists because we sit in the middle of these two giants: Great Britain and the U.S.

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

I think American guys tend to be a bit more forward, a bit more chatty and open than the Brits. The Brits seem to have a darker sense of humor, though I have met some Americans who have adopted bits of the British dry sense of humor as well.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.

The way we always want to compromise between everything, I think that's really Belgian. I think I'm really Belgian for that, because I never make choices. That's my problem, actually.

The acknowledgement that this person is English, white, or French, or German, this is Portuguese, this is Rwandan, this is Senegalese, this is a black South Africans is a glorious thing. To speak of those positively, to say that they have characteristics, each one of them, that the others almost always do not have, and that there is a complementarily about it.

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.

The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

When I'm doing a store in a country, I always like to consider the concept of the country and the city.

I don't really want the kind of Englishness that I have represented.

That's how the Germans are.... The aristocrats at the top hard as glass, cold as ice, servants of the King, the working masses willing, pliable, sentimental, susceptible to brutality, the middle class educated and cowardly to the point of servility.

You may as well know that one American national trait which irritates many Americans and must be convenient for our critics is that we relentlessly advertise our imperfections.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

Irish people never think we're Irish. Americans think we're European or French.

And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning.

Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.