A Quote by Jane Jacobs

I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing.
Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads in the biggest and most powerful puddle in the world. Their sense of power comes from identifying with the puddle. Canadians as individuals may have more power within the puddle, since there are fewer toads in it; it's the puddle that's seen as powerless.
Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays. Americans arrive at the border with skis in July, and straight people think that being gay is just a phase. A very long phase.
But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.
I say a few good things about Canada in the book, you know. Americans are weird, though. We refuse to look at other countries. Start with Canadians - I want to think you aren't that different, so why can't we do our incarceration policies more like Canada? If we still had a 1970 level of incarceration which was the same as Canada's then and now, I never would have written this.
I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35.5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35.5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.
I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.
To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.
Americans are much easier to please than Canadians. The American taste is less critical. Canadians are more cultured, they are more aware of the arts than Americans.
If you're lucky enough to work with great actors and creative people, they're always just going to be who they are, so I don't think there's a difference between the Brits and the Americans.
I would always argue to my students that Canada is not necessarily or inherently a left-wing country, and the United States is not necessarily the citadel of right-wing liberty. The obvious case there is Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which made the Americans much further left than the Canadians at the time, and Americans coming to Canada found us backward, conservative, and out of tune with the kind of free-spirited liberalism that there was in the States. Then things reversed, with medicare the prime example.
I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.
I'm so tired of the left trying to divide us by race. One of the things I said today in my speech, we're not Indian-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans, rich Americans, poor Americans. We're all Americans.
It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.
Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.
The national media which I consider to be very racist against European Americans and I think they have caused the incitement of African Americans against European Americans.I also think that they have also facilitated European Americans being angry at African Americans.
Baseball in Canada is like soccer in the U.S. It is growing, and some people are starting to gain interest. The way that there are Americans playing high-level soccer, there are Canadians breaking into the Major Leagues.
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