quotations about patriotism
No patriotism is genuine that is merely partisan or provincial.
WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER
The Biblical World, vol. 54
Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
DENIS DIDEROT
"Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws"
Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.... When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood -- a truly free society.
EMMA GOLDMAN
speech, "What Is Patriotism?", 1908
Patriotism is something that comes from within, it will arise automatically when all citizens are treated equally with love, harmony and with an effort to reduce poverty, starvation, caste inequality and religious fanaticism.
PRAVESH JAIN
"Development hostage to nationalism debate", The Statesman, April 5, 2016
A man doesn't have to agree with his government to be a patriot, does he? It takes a true patriot to dissent, to say he loves his country more than he cares for his own place in the social order.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Ashes
Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Patriotism is an evidence of the wider and deeper impulses of a man's nature. It is a leaving of the carrion of one's own petty individual self interests and a devotion of one's mind and strength to another's good and welfare, even to the personal loss of the man himself. It is a giving which is not tainted with price; it is a sacrifice where value is not measured by returns gained. It is the manifested love of one to another for all and is an attribute of human thought and deed born of the Eternal Spirit and finding life in the world regardless of its smothering smallness and petty limitations.
HONOR L. WILHELM
The Coast, July 1908
All nations teach their children to be "patriotic", and abuse the other nations for fostering nationalism.
RICHARD ALDINGTON
"Sacrifice Post"
Patriotism, to be, posits a complex relationship of self-destruction: it legitimizes actions taken in the name of basic political principles that traduce those same principles; it accords itself a special, perhaps higher, authority to monopolize politics and to silence, marginalize, and ultimately disable opposition, particularly when opposition matters most; it induces affective states that lead to plans and policies otherwise objectionable or even unthinkable; it conceals the damage that it does through professions of love and declamations of terrible necessity that adherents would recognize; it emerges as a primap, preemptive force precisely because polities cannot face the cruelties, injustices, and exclusions that characterize them. Thus perhaps patriotism cannot but be insistent, imperitival, and univocal. In sum, patriotism proves itself to be anything but indispensable to democracy; rather democracy's future depends on its emergence from patriotism's self-obsessive grip.
STEVEN JOHNSTON
The Truth about Patriotism
Patriotism is the intelligent appreciation that one's own welfare is inseparably connected with the general welfare and that to prosper personally one must intelligently do his utmost to maintain the general prosperity.
JULIUS STERLING MORTON
The Conservative, vol. 1
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most undoubted meaning is for rulers nothing else but a means of realizing their ambitions and venal ends; for the governed it is a renouncing of human dignity, intelligence, and conscience, and a slavish submission to the rulers. Wherever patriotism is championed, it is preached invariably in that shape. Patriotism is slavery.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Open Court, July 16, 1896
Part of the problem with extreme patriotism is that it makes the support of one's country and its policies unconditional. Moderate patriots, on the other hand, see that taking morality seriously requires that our commitment to our country be conditional in two ways. First, the actions or policies of a government must be worthy of support or, at least, must not be serious violations of morality. When nations behave immorally, patriots need not support them.
STEPHEN NATHANSON
Patriotism, Morality, and Peace
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Patriotism is not endlessly bragging that out country is the best; rather it is wanting one's country to be the best that it can be and helping it to be that best, which is a very different matter.
ROBERT STAM & ELLA SHOHAT
Flagging Patriotism
One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.
ANDY ROONEY
My War
There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Freeholder, January 6, 1716
When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
journal entry, December 10, 1824
True patriotism is quiet, simple, dignified; it is not blatant, verbose, vociferous. The noisy shriekers who go about with a chip on their shoulders and cry aloud for war upon the slightest provocation belong to the class contemptuously known as "Jingoes." They may be patriotic--and as a fact they often are--but their patriotism is too frothy, too hysteric, too unintelligent, to inspire confidence. True patriotism is not swift to resent an insult; on the contrary, it is slow to take offense, slow to believe that an insult could have been intended. True patriotism, believing fully in the honesty of its own acts, assumes also that others are acting with the same honesty. True patriotism, having a solid pride in the power and resources of our country, doubts always the likelihood of any other nation being willing to arouse our enmity.
MAURICE GARLAND FULTON
Expository Writing
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.
HOWARD ZINN
Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology
Patriotism is a narrow minded concept. It binds a nation in the bonds of love and loyalty. But it does not consider the international brotherhood of man.
V. P. GAUTAM
Book of Composition