America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.