Appreciation For America From Other Countries

This is a continuation post from a previous post going over the top 20 American Quotes from Americans. Now we are going to see what countries and how other countries view America. Not everyone loves America, but we have made some big impacts on many that are extremely grateful.

"It is worth saying [about America] once again that no nation has ever come into the possession of such powers for good or ill, for freedom or tyranny, for friendship or enmity among the peoples of the world, and that no nation in history has used those powers, by and large, with greater vision, restraint, responsibility and courage."

-London Times, 1954

What great compliments from the London Times! But who else and where else has been spoken of America so highly?

"This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the world. As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Well, who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did, that's who....When distant cities are hit by earthquake, it is the United States that hurries in to help....The Marshall Plan....the Truman Policy....all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. And now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering American's_I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name to me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?"

-Gordon Sinclair (June 5th, 1973, Radio Broadcast)

Allan Gordon Sinclair, OC, FRGS was a Canadian journalist, writer, and commentator.

"The United States has long shown itself to be the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world. Wherever there is a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a natural disaster, an epidemic, who is the first to help? The United States. Who helps the most and unselfishly? The United States."

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Speech in Washington, D.C., June 30th, 1975)

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner.

They aren't wrong. The United States has stepped in to help countless countries over and over again. We put human life highly and wish to do our best to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness everywhere. There is only the danger of overstepping our bounds and interfering with how the country is run. So we can best help by stepping in and offering assistance during their times of need.

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

-Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America, Vol. 1, 1835)

Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, colloquially known as Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian.

"The thing they forget is that liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and then stop. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them."

-Sergeant Alvin C. York (speaking at the Tome of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery, 1941, in reply to whose who asked, "What did war get you?")

Alvin Cullum York, also known as Sergeant York, was one of the most decorated United States Army soldiers of World War I.

"Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and farsightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devasted our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the U.S., we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent."

-Letter by the prime ministers of Britain, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, and the president of the Czech Republic (published Jan 30th, 2003)

"There are no words that can express the debt of gratitude that future generations of Iraqis will owe to Americans. It would have been easy to have turned your back on our plight, but this is not the tradition of this great country, nor the first time in history you stood up with your allies for freedom and democracy."

-Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq

(address to a joint meeting of Congress, Sept. 23th, 2004)

"Hello, American sailor! Hello, freedom man!"

-Vietnamese refugees to sailors aboard the USS Midway

"I am full of admiration for your country not because it's a big power and not because it's rich, even though one could envy that. I admire America as a country of freedom-freedom of man and freedom of a nation. You took that freedom yourself. Nobody gave it to you as a present. You built it through your hard work, step by step. You created wonderful democratic institutions, which are an example for many other countries. But more [of all], you created human attachments to freedom."

-Lech Walesa, cofounder of the Polish trade union Solidarity

(upon receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Nov 13th, 1989)

"The Americans are at bottom a conservative people, in virtue both of the deep instincts of their race and of that practical shrewdness which recognizes the value of permanence and solidity in institutions. They are conservative in their fundamental beliefs, in the structure of their governments, in their social and domestic usages. They are like a tree whose pendulous shoots quiver and rustle with the lightest breeze, while its roots enfold the rock with a grasp which storms cannot loosen."

-James Bryce (The American Commonwealth, Vol. 2, 1888)

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, was an Ulster-born academic, jurist, historian, and Liberal politician.

"[The American ideal of] equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men being equally tall of equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death."

-G. K. Chesterton (What I Saw in America, 1922)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.

"The United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate."

-Winston Churchill

"The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."

-William Gladstone (1878)

William Ewart Gladstone was a British statesman and Liberal politician.

"Without the U.S., this day would not have been possible. Tell your people that."

-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to President George H. W. Bush

(discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989)

I am quite pleased with the reputation that America has gained in the past. We should still honor and remember those times of accomplishment and aim to keep our standards high. What other quotes have you heard from high officials of other countries? Or well-known figures that can speak for their country? What has been said by these people make me pleased to be an American!