It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.