American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.
- Octavio Paz

Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- Arnold Toynbee

the_band_huge

"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.
― Bertrand Russell

Global Coke

"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.
― Frantz Fanon

What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.
- Carlos Fuentes

Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.
- Porfirio Diaz

the_band_huge

"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi

chimerica

"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

Coke and 'America the Beautiful'

"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

Coke and 'America the Beautiful'

predator-firing-missile4

"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

predator-firing-missile4

America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
- Georges Clemenceau

I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
- Edmund Burke

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan

"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.
- Mao Tse-tung

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.
- Red Cloud

In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.
- Marlene Dietrich

I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.
- Lord Byron

One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.
- Roberto Calasso

Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
- Alexis de Tocqueville

newtown

"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.
- Jean Baudrillard

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson

America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.
- Philip Bailey

"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.
- James Joyce

Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz

The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.
- Oscar Wilde

"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION

When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.
- Oscar Wilde

jobs drug dealer

They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.

jobs drug dealer

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.
- Georg Friedrich Hegel

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
- Arnold Toynbee

Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill

The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.
- Edward, Duke of Windsor

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
- John Maynard Keynes

Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.
- Margaret Thatcher

America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.
- Israel Zangwill

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.
- Pico Iyer

America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.
― D.H. Lawrence

I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.
― Bono

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
― Roberto Bolaño

October 15, 2024

Africa

Home • • • Africa

The Africa theater explores the African continent, minus the largely Islamic regions of North Africa.

We’re looking for volunteers to help direct this theater. If interested, please contact us.

* SUBMIT MATERIAL / VOLUNTEER *

(We’re looking, in particular, for suggestions about the most influential expressions about America from Africa; tell us what should be in our archives, and why, in the Africa – Founders section of our forums.)

Highlights

FORUMS

• Timeline: Which events belong?

• Who are the Founders?

• South Africa too American to Lead?

• “Goodbye, Tata”

NEW TO THE ARCHIVES

• “Not Our Big Brother,” by Hannatu Musawa

Featured

from Africa Review

Courting Africa: From Tyrants to Turbines

By DANIEL KALINAKI

What is Africa’s problem? To many, it is power and the failure to use, manage and transfer it peacefully.

So it is not surprising that last week’s US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington focused extensively on power in Africa — only that the focus was on electricity, not the continent’s politics.

The biggest announcement from Washington was that private US companies had agreed to invest $14 billion in US Power Africa, an initiative by President Barack Obama’s Administration to increase electricity output and access on the continent.

Power Africa, which started in 2013 with $7 billion over five years, now has more than $26 billion in promised funding. It has attracted the support of the World Bank (whose President Jim Yong Kim has thrown in $5 billion in cash, guarantees and advisory services) and the Swedish government ($300 million).

Join the Discussion

AFRICA TIMELINE