"Clinton talked the talk and did diddly squat, whereas Bush doesn't talk, but does deliver," - Lord Alli, British African aid activist
"I'm not naive about my country. My country is definitely not always right; my country has at times been terribly wrong. But I know this about Americans: We don't set out to kill innocent people. We don't cheer when innocent people die." - Dave Barry, on 9/11
"Pretty much the entire membership of the United Nations also hates us, because we haven't been paying our dues, which the member nations desperately need so that they can continue carrying out the vital U.N. mission of parking illegally all over New York." - Dave Barry
"The rules also state that, when you drop your bombs, you are supposed to try to gain a Consensus of World Opinion, which is legally defined as 'at least four nations that know how to make a decent car, plus, if he is not off somewhere building a house, Jimmy Carter'" - Dave Barry
"I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs. Until the Bush team came to power, foreign relations were conducted with a certain gentlemanly decorum. The first Bush administration urged regime change in Iraq, without sullying itself with the Iraqi peasants actually trying to do it. The Clinton administration pretended to fight terrorism without committing the sin of unilateralism by trying very hard." - David Brooks
"The Great Satan is wearying of this reverse hegemony, in which little pipsqueak nations try to impose their pipsqueak values on us. Aren't we the ones who should be arrogantly oppressing countries that unaccountably do not have the death penalty?" - Ann Coulter
"Europeans try to live with danger. Americans try to remove it." - Steven Den Beste
"The problem is that the UN is not acting as "united nations". It's acting as a place where many nations (my own included) try to use the mechanism to their own benefit at the expense of others and given that, I find it to be more dangerous than helpful. A helpful UN would be valued, but an inimical and tyrannical UN is better off dead. The reason I want the UN humiliated and deemphasized is that what it has become is worse than useless." - Steven Den Beste
"Anyway, the gist of the disagreement between Europe and America is the 'peens think they achieved lasting peace through endless conversations in Swiss hotels with bottles of bubbly water and plates of runny cheese scattered about the table. Americans think the reason Europeans have achieved lasting peace has something to do with the fact that every time these conversations broke out into full-blown brawls, the United States marched into the room and imposed order like a parent getting the kids to stop wrestling over the remote control." - Jonah Goldberg
"Isn't it time we made that American sentiment 'Live free or die' into a goddamn ultimatum?" - Stephen Green
"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?" - Paul Harvey
"Clinton bears indirect reponsibility for the September 11th attacks because of his failure to tear his attention away from his poll numbers, his "legacy," and his desire to avoid the consequences of his deep sociopathic need for immediate sexual affirmation from female underlings and do what needed to be done. His legacy is a still-smoking crater in lower Manhattan and 3,300 funerals. That may sound harsh, but it's undeniable to anyone with a sense of history and a few more brain cells than Bill Maher or your average Hollywood limousine lib." - Mike Hendrix
"I'm good and tired of all the people in this country who seem to be just fine with the notion that any and all proclamations issued from the UN do and in fact should supercede the authority of the US Constitution. Likewise, I'm tired of hearing that the opinion of the rest of the world should have a lot of significance when it comes to deciding what actions this nation may or may not undertake in the pursuit of its own interests. Other nations are perfectly free to respond to said actions in any way they deem necessary and appropriate, but they do not possess any sort of automatic veto over our own, nor should they. In many instances (if not most), the interests of Europe, Asia, the Arab states, etc. either do not coincide - or are in direct conflict - with our own. This is normal. But to say that we have some moral obligation to consider the interests of these nations when charting our own course is a bit like saying we shouldn't mow our lawns because the snakes prefer the grass longer. Our government's sole obligation is to us, the citizenry; our government's duty is to put America's interests first, period. I really can't understand what's so hard to grasp about this, and I damn sure don't understand how there can be so many people - American citizens - who not only don't seem to understand this idea but actually are vehemently opposed to it." - Mike Hendrix
"Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." - Eric Hoffer
"We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries. We assess government performance using measures of government intervention, public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government, and political freedom. We find that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance. We also find that the larger governments tend to be the better performing ones. The importance of historical factors in explaining the variation in government performance across countries sheds light on the economic, political, and cultural theories of institutions." - Abstract: La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny, The Quality of Government, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1999
"Western technology made slavery unnecessary; Western ideas made it intolerable." - Bernard Lewis
"The United States is often criticized for being selfishly isolationist until we want something, like oil or access to freedom-stealing murderous thugs. Okay, so when we needed to get into Afghanistan, we dropped some crates of food on the starving Afghanis. That's not selfish, it's smart. When the fire started flying, who were the Afghanis going to side with, the guys who slit their carotid arteries for fast dancing or the guys who made it rain Nutrigrain bars and Sunny Delight?" - Dennis Miller
"You wanna know the Perfect European? Here he is, Antonio Martino, representing the Italian government as defense minister. First, he says that under no circumstances will the Italian military join the United States in war. Then he says that the United States must not act without the consent and participation of a broad coalition of allies." - Jay Nordlinger
"[Revenge] will inevitably -- and arguably rightly -- become the resort of decent people when law and government fail to deliver justice. Post-modern governments fail in just that way. Humanitarian bodies such as Amnesty International are even worse: They practice a sort of unilateral civil libertarianism that holds governments to account for the smallest infraction of civil liberty but treats terrorism as a natural disaster. Transnational bodies like the U.N. and the EU are worse -- they seek to take the weapons of war and capital punishment from us in our struggles against terrorism, slavery, piracy and hostage-taking and to force us to rely instead on their own paper resolutions and elevated principles." - John O'Sullivan
"We Americans can expect neither gratitude, understanding nor support from the baroque regimes of France, Germany and their fellow travelers. Chancellor Schroeder? Bill Clinton without the moral fiber. President Chirac? The mouth of de Gaulle, the soul of Petain, and the morals of a pimp. Humanitarian Belgium? Yeah, just ask the Congolese. The European anti-war movement? Necrophiliacs licking the corpse of Josef Stalin." - Ralph Peters
"[F]ar from being a Parliament Of Nations imbued with respect for all that's good, the United Nations is, in fact, a dictators' club whose chief role is protecting the perks of dictators." - Glenn Harlan Reynolds
"While Iran and Iraq belong to the Islamic world, North Korea is run by a Stalinist from outer space. If you're in the mood, the distinctions can be further broken down: Iraq's regime falls into the Hitlerian mode, while Iran today is a terrorism-sponsoring tyranny of a more internally diverse and volatile kind." - Claudia Rosett, on "The Axis of Evil"
"How can you justify bullshit like that, especially when you're not even a real country?" - Ted Schwartzberg, on Canada sucking
"For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane." - Neal Stephenson
"To those cynical Europeans who say, "Oh, it's absurd to think Arabs can ever be functioning members of a democrat state", I'd say, in that case why are you allowing virtually unrestricted Muslim immigration into your own countries?" - Mark Steyn
"American naivety transformed Japan and Germany. Anglo-French worldliness gave us Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and thereby September 11." - Mark Steyn
"No matter how disgustingly they behave a substantial chunk of the American electorate and big majorities in every other western nation hear the words "United Nations" and automatically associate it with benign multilateralism. They've got some old Polaroid of Audrey Hepburn surrounded by multiethnic UNICEF moppets lodged in the back of their heads, and it never fades. So I'm in favour of the serious powers allowing the UN to decay into an irrelevant talking-shop for Third World dictators and their European apologists." - Mark Steyn
"Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy." - Margaret Thatcher
"The crushing burden of a gargantuan welfare state, combined with rotten weather and the metric system, drives Canada's best and brightest across the border to America." - James Taranto
"Canada is the Cree word for 'freezer full of communists.'" - Jake Troughton
"Just imagine if Chomsky had been working around the time of WWII: "The Allies attack on Nazi Germany is not mitigated in the least by the fact that it was to prevent further genocide and the triumph of fascism." How we would have applauded such ethical purity! "Why, Professor Chomsky," we'd have said, "our planet is too corrupt for one such as you! You should find a planet of your own, far away from we sinful people, somewhere where the air is pure and the water tastes of the sweetest nectar!"" - Daddy Warblogs (aka Steven Chapman)
"I’m not fiercely proud to be an American because of my upbringing, or an accident of birth. I read. I think. I make my own judgments. I feel that way based on the evidence." - Bill Whittle
"Funny how it takes just one Canadian each time to remind me how much I don't like all of them." - Anonymous Coward, Slashdot talkback