Politics & Power Quote by Brigitte Bardot

Bardot’s compliment lands with a sly built-in disclaimer: “I know very few Americans” isn’t modesty so much as a way of granting herself permission to generalize. It’s the celebrity’s classic move - intimacy without responsibility. Then she pivots to admiration, but an admiration aimed less at people than at a national posture: “the way they think.” America becomes a mindset, not a passport.

“They think big” works because it’s both praise and provocation. On the surface, it flatters American ambition: scale, confidence, the refusal to act small. Underneath, it quietly contrasts that bigness with the cramped sophistication Europe often congratulates itself for - the art of limits, nuance, restraint. Bardot is not offering policy analysis; she’s capturing a cultural vibe the way movie stars often do, in a line that feels like it could be delivered between flashes of paparazzi.

Context matters: Bardot came up in postwar France, when America was simultaneously liberator, cultural exporter, and looming superpower. French intellectual and artistic circles could be allergic to American mass culture, yet fascinated by its energy and reach. Her sentence threads that needle. She likes the thinking, not necessarily the details; the scale, not the mess. It’s a soft-focus endorsement of American audacity, delivered from the safe distance of someone who can admire the myth without having to live inside its contradictions.