“For a European long immersed in all the rotten stuff of past event, past hatreds, past habits, past glories and past diseases which compose a sort of overwhelming historical heredity, the first contact with America is thus liable to produce a sort of intoxication, a delight in a new-born freedom, as if the old burden of historical necessities were suddenly put aside. It seemed that everything is possible to human freedom.”
Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America