Who Are We? Quotes

“We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity

“America's core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded American society. The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity

“Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity

“To describe America as a "nation of immigrants" is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America's beginning as a society of settlers.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity

“We Americans" face a substantive problem of national identity epitomized by the subject of this sentence. Are we a "we," one people or several? If we are a "we," what distinguishes us from the "thems" who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what?”
― Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity

“Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity