Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.

— Jacob M. Appel

America is a post-Christian nation only in the sense that we have built a tenement on the foundation of a palace.

— Ron Brackin

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

— Louis Simpson

So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...

— Poul Anderson

That America is an exceptional nation is unclear only to one who has not been taught its true history. It ceases to be exceptional only when its representative leaders cease to be exceptional. America, it has been said, is a nation of laws, not of men. The more it becomes a nation of men, the less it remains America.

— Ron Brackin

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

— Cormac McCarthy

[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.

— Zbigniew Brzeziński

I dont know what happens to country.

— Cormac McCarthy