Quotes about nationalism

C.V. Wedgwood - The Thirty Years War

The nationalist regrets the change an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.

Voltaire -

It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Peter Singer -

I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field it's in contention with a lot of different things.

Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narr

Aysha Taryam -

One’s love for his country is a very sacred emotion that is intertwined with their sense of moral obligation and is an essential part of one’s identity.

Stefan Molyneux -

Statism ends with an eye roll.

Stefan Molyneux -

Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.

Stefan Molyneux -

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life.

Fela Durotoye -

Individual effort is good but collective effort is better. We need a NETWORK of nation builders

Manasa Rao -

Borrowing other people’s culture and adopting other people’s way of life does destroy nation’s self-respect which is the greatest asset a true citizen can enjoy more than food and clothes, more than all amenities and more than military glory. You can adopt a system of government and a way of life, but can you adopt the past history, travail and tradition out of which that system of government and a way of life were evolved? Can we adopt King Charles, King John, Magna Carta and civil wars and Cro

Stefan Molyneux -

The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive

Phillip Andrew Bennett Low - Indecision Now! A Libertarian Rage

And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’

Brother Andrew - God's Smuggler

The Church is larger than any one nation or any one political scene.

Emmanuel Katongole - Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

The church's primary purpose is not to make America more Christian, but to make American Christians less American and Rwandan Christians less Rwandan. We are no longer Rwandans or Americans, neither Hutu nor Tutsi. If we are in Christ, we have become part of a new creation.

José Rizal - Noli Me Tángere

I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra

Nilantha Ilangamuwa -

Will there be people who will have the conscience to contribute to the country by changing themselves first? That is the need of the moment.

Jiddu Krishnamurti - The Krishnamurti Reader

We are asking if thought can be aware of itself. That is rather a complex question, and requires very careful observation. Thought has created wars through nationalism, through sectarian religions. Thought has created all this; God has not created the hierarchy of the church--the pope, all the robes, all the rituals, the swinging of the incense, the candles. All that paraphernalia that goes on in a cathedral or in a church is put together by thought, copied, some of it, from the ancient Egyptian

Albert Camus -

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.

Vasily Grossman - An Armenian Sketchbook

The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found.

Vasily Grossman - An Armenian Sketchbook

What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is in essence, simply human nature. All the worlds nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another. The foundation of any national character is human nature. The foundation of national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallisation of it.

George Orwell -

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-ho

Amit Abraham -

Many people tell me that I should become a politician but I tell them no I want to do something good for the nation.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius - Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History

Our side has agents. Their side has spies.

Robert Byron - The Road to Oxiana

Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.

Joe Abercrombie - Before They Are Hanged

Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to.

Chester Elijah Branch - Lecture Notes

Many groups use the media and successfully manipulate what Theodor Adorno calls our psychological frailty. This psychological frailty correlates to anxiety. It also precedes and foments fascism, sexism, and racism.Because of our sense of free will, day-to-day anxiety can creep in as a form of guilt or the desire to belong / be loved.It is this frailty that is manipulated which may later be expressed in fascism, nationalism, sexism, racism.It's based on superego storytelling. But what's going on

William Golding - Lord of the Flies

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people...

John Scalzi - The Human Division

The rest of the rebels were recruited from the ranks of the young and excitable and had rather more enthusiasm than skill.

Idowu Koyenikan - Wealth for All Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams

Show me the heroes that the youth of your country look up to, and I will tell you the future of your country.

Richard J. Foster - Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World

I am not posing these questions only to the world at large. I query us who own Christ as our life. Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Is there not an obligation upon us to do justice,

Fareed Zakaria - The Post-American World

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care

Abhijit Naskar -

Ten responsible and rational young citizens are sufficient to clean up the mess of a thousand old superstitious citizens.

Raja Rao - Kanthapura: Indian Novel

O fire, O soulGive us the spark of God-eternal,That friend to friend and friend to foe,One shall we stand before HIM.And the flame of Jatin,And the fire of Bhagath,And the love of the Mahatma in all,O, lift the flag high,Lift the flag high,This is the flag of the Revolution.

John Stuart Mill -

So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.

Abhijit Naskar - I Am The Thread: My Mission

Patriotism or Nationalism without reasoning is what I call “Nationalist Fundamentalism”, which is as dangerous as “Religious Fundamentalism”.

Nivedita Menon - Seeing Like a Feminist

There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe.

Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to.

Antonio Negri; Michael Hardt - Commonwealth

The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes

Pramoedya Ananta Toer - The Mute's Soliloquy: a Memoir

There is at least one advantage to being an Indonesian citizen: With this country's expanse of land and even greater expanse of sea, it's not difficult finding space for one's grave.

Donald J. Trump - Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again

Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.

Donald J. Trump - Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellemce, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go

Donald J. Trump - Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellence, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go

Victor Hugo - Les Misérables

France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.

B.H. Liddell Hart -

Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and ea

Steve Brouwer - Sharing the Pie : A Citizen's Guide to Wealth and Power

Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranation

Janvier Chouteu-Chando - Disciples of Fortune

The greatest sacrifice a man can make is the image of his soul.

Arthur Schopenhauer - Essays and Aphorisms

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

H.G. Wells -

Our true nationality is mankind.

David G. McAfee - Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings

If you are religious, you believe that your religion is the 'right' one—and, in many cases, all others will be sent to hell. Similarly, a nationalist believes his or her nation is better or more advanced—and a racist believes that an inherent difference between each race make his or her ethnicity superior. All of these ideologies spawn the hate, philosophical disagreements, and prejudices that have been the catalysts for various atrocious acts throughout history.

Vasily Grossman - An Armenian Sketchbook

Communication between people of different nationalities enriches human society and makes it more colourful.. Imagine our Russian intellectuals, the kind, merry, perceptive old women in our villages, our elderly workers, our young lads, our little girls being free to enter the melting pot of ordinary human intercourse with the people of North and South America, of China, France, India, Britain and the Congo. What a rich variety of customs, fashion, cuisine and labour would then be revealed! what

Vasily Grossman - An Armenian Sketchbook

What matters is the need to move from the rigidity of national stereotypes towards something more truly human; what matters is to discover the riches of human hearts and souls; what matters is the human content of poetry and science, the universal charm and beauty of architecture; what matters is the magnanimity of a nation's leaders and historical figures. only by exalting what is truly human, only by fusing the national with what is universally human, can try dignity - and true freedom - be ac

Robert Winder - Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain

All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.

Malcolm X -

No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They’re robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it’s the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.

Vladimir Putin -

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

Munindra Misra - PT. Kanhaiya Lal Misra - My Father

To write about him is to write about Greatness. To discuss him is todiscuss Intellectual Brilliance. To think of him is to think of Modesty,Simplicity and Lucidity. To remember him is to remember Nationalism atits finest hour. He was not one of those who merely achieved greatnessnor certainly one of those upon whom greatness was thrust-he was infact born great.

Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason

The offspring of nationalist thinking too often expresses itself in exclusionary and passively-violent legal policies, and then sadly, through militarism, which becomes manifest on the endless blood-soaked borders and battlefields of humanity's great failure as a humane species.

George Orwell -

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not chang

Carl Sagan - Cosmos

The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species.

Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason

The existence of excessive nationalism is a symptom of a deeper problem in the collective consciousness, which is continually being exploited.

Barbara W. Tuchman - 1890-1914

All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Harold Cruse - The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership

The path to the ethnic democratization of American society is through its culture, that is to say through its cultural apparatus, which comprises the eyes, the ears, and the "mind" of capitalism and is twentieth-century voice to the world. Thus to democratize the cultural apparatus is tantamount to revolutionizing American society itself into the living realization of its professed ideas. Seeing the problem in another way, to revolutionize the cultural apparatus is to deal fundamentally with the

Richard Rohr - Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

Tarif Naaz - Mayhem In Paradise

I am not going to believe in militant nationalism, which cultivates a culture of intolerance, Can't we think of a solution without violence.

Barbara W. Tuchman - 1890-1914

Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to "receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.

Oscar Wilde -

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious

Banksy - Wall and Piece

People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one

José Rizal - Noli Me Tángere

How long have you been away from the country?" Laruja asked Ibarra."Almost seven years.""Then you have probably forgotten all about it.""Quite the contrary. Even if my country does seem to have forgotten me, I have always thought about it.

Visar Zhiti - The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

ABYSSOur country livesAmong the deadAnd dies among the livingSometimes.

George Orwell - Selected Essays

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises, and how a real love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

George Orwell - Notes on Nationalism

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando -

A land is precious, but ours is to be revered.

Jonathan Sacks -

Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.

Kyle Kulinski -

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Patriotism is the surefire wingnut that binds our diverse society. Rulers historically used patriotism to manipulate the populous. Patriotism serves as the trump card to justify going to war and mandatory inscription of young men into military service. Patriotism is becoming synonyms with state justified coercion and murder of less powerful people.

Abhijit Naskar -

No nation can truly develop unless fanaticism, primitive superstitions and metaphysical non-sense are eradicated.

Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism

The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.

Jiddu Krishnamurti -

Patriotism, whether it is of the Western kind, or of the Eastern kind, is the same, a poison in human beings that is really distorting thought. So patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease. When, in time of war, the whole world talks of patriotism, you will know the falseness of it, and therefore you will act as a true human being

Barbara W. Tuchman - 1890-1914

The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country.

Taner Akçam -

In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.

Rabindranath Tagore - The Home and the World

Now that a full flood of music has swept over our country, let Nikhil practise his scales, while we rouse the land with our cracked voices[.]

Sydney J. Harris -

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

Robert Breeze - 2083: The Chronicles Of Hope

I’ve never really understood national pride, or even ethnic pride. It should be more about pride at being a human and living on this planet with fellow humans surely, let’s widen the parameters a bit

Auliq Ice -

A true patriot never abandons his country at the hour of need.

Vasily Grossman - An Armenian Sketchbook

The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then become pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own.

Mrs. Ernest Ames - An ABC for Baby Patriots

C" is for colonies Rightly we boastthat of all the great nationsGreat Britain has most!

Markus Zusak - The Book Thief

It's pathetic how a man can stand by and do nothing as a whole nation cleans out the garbage and makes itself great"-Hans Junior

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ -

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or in the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

W.H. Auden -

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ -

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it.

B.H. Liddell Hart - The Revolution in Warfare

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. ‘Automatic warfare’ cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance. (...)The advent of ‘automatic warfare’ should make plain the absurdity of warfa

Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna

The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.

Jacob M. Appel - The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.

Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason

Nationalism is a form of cultural self-centeredness, and as a collective thought-form, can only exist because the dominant in-group is itself comprised of self-centered and narcissistic individuals.

Richard J. Mouw - Political Evangelism

The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.

George Orwell -

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nation

Jonah Goldberg -

Nationalism and socialism as actually lived and applied in the 20th century are the same thing (and in the 18th and 19th century, nationalism was often a force for classical liberalism!). It’s all a kind of reactionary tribalism (another “ism” which becomes poisonous quickly as you up the dosage). When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. When you socialize an industry you nationalize it. Yes, international socialism rejected this formulation. And that’s why international socialism fai