Power Paradox

Paradoxically, now that we've become the most powerful nation in the world, we haven't the same positive influence we once had when, as a people, we were weakest. The American way of life is not the automatic choice of other people, as frequently it has been fashioned not to the enrichment but to the detriment of others. And at home the hammer of freedom is so frequently divorced from the chisel of justice that the common good, often as not, is identified with the good of those in power

"Creedo", by William Sloane Coffin