From BillionQuotes
- "In the Beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." Mark Twain
- "Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country." —Theodore Roosevelt
- "I hate patriotism. I can't stand it.... It's a round world, last time I checked." -Bill Hicks
- "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." —Nathan Hale (allegedly), prior to execution for espionage
- “By ‘nationalism’... I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. 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. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” —George Orwell, Essay: Notes on Nationalism, 1945
- “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!” —Albert Einstein
- “Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. [...] Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.” —Emma Goldman, Patriotism: a menace to liberty
- “He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.” —Harry Emerson Fosdick
- “...It follows that I find my justification for allegiance to [the] rules of morality in my particular community; deprived of the life of that community, I would have no reason to be moral ... It is in general only within a community that individuals become capable of morality ... once we recognize that typically moral agency and ... moral capacity are engendered and sustained in essential ways by particular institutionalised social ties in particular social groups, it will be difficult to counterpose allegiance to a particular society and allegiance to morality in the way in which the protagonists of liberal morality do ... Indeed, the case for treating patriotism as a virtue [becomes] clear.” —Alasdair MacIntyre, Is Patriotism a Virtue?
- “Leo Tolstoy [...] defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers”. —Emma Goldman in a speech titled What is patriotism? delivered in 1908
- “Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.” —Seneca
- “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’.” - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
- “Patriotism ... for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. ... Patriotism is slavery.” —Leo Tolstoy, in his pamphlet Christianity and Patriotism (1894, Russian text is here)
- “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” —Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1775 (recorded in James Boswell’s biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.. For discussion of the context of Johnson's remark, see this web page.)
- “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” —Oscar Wilde
- “Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.” —Bertrand Russell
- “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” —George Bernard Shaw
- “Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.” —attributed to Bertrand Russell
- “The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.” —Emma Goldman
- “[The pamphlet] was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.” —Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
- “The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice — and always has been.” —Mark Twain
- “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” —Thomas Jefferson
- “There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.” —J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, 1966.
- “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.” —Emma Goldman
- “To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.” —George Santayana
- “We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.
Such is the logic of patriotism.” —Emma Goldman
- “When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.” —Winston Churchill
- “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” —Lin Yutang
- “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
- "I would sooner receive injustice in the Queen's courts than justice in a foreign court. I hold that man or woman to be a scoundrel who goes abroad to a foreign court to have the judgments of the Queen's courts overturned, the actions of her Government countermanded or the legislation of parliament struck down." — Enoch Powell
de:Patriotismus
eo:Patriotismo
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zh:愛國主義
