Quotes About Nationalism

I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them.

globalism (for better or worse) transforms personal and ethnic identities, creating hyphenated and cosmopolitan identities—in which people consider themselves first and foremost citizens of the earth and members of the earth's ecosystem more than as citizens of a nation or members of a religion. This identity disruption creates fissures and fractures among existing elites who are still managing parochial national, cultural, ethnic, or religious systems.11

I mean, when the British burned down the White House in the war of 1812, did we plant a Tree of Remembrance in the ashes, or did we get busy rebuilding?

Each country excels in some things, and in the rest is just the same as other countries: mediocre.

In worshipping their nationhood men worship themselves and scorn others, and that is no healthy thing.

Whenever a party tells you national identity matters more than anything else in politics, that nationalism can sort out all the other problems, then watch out, because you're on a road that can end with fascism.

We used to think British people could never become Fascists, or Fascist collaborators. But they can. I suppose anybody can, given the right set of circumstances.

Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world.

The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility – more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.

We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.

Nationalism is like class. You have to have it in order to be rid of it.

When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, 'On the contrary.

revolutionary nationalism was by far the most successful radical tide of the the twentieth century.

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

Raising the flag and singing the anthem are, while somewhat suspicious, not in themselves acts of treason.

It is considered in the Sto Plains that only scoundrels know the second verse of their national anthem, since anyone spending time memorizing that would be up to no good purpose.

It's all trickery. They keep you down and when they piss off some other country, you have to fight for them! It's only your country when they want you to get killed!

But we might go to war to keep some damn island that's only useful in case we have to go to war, right?

Gettysburg is at risk of becoming a place of war worship. In our desperation to perceive valor and courage that may not be present in our own lives, we glorify a terrible slaughter of men and boys. The myth that war propagates and that our national memory perpetuates is that all soldiers are valiant and brave, and that American history is a history victorious instead of shadowed and scarred.

I think to be - for me to be an American is - you know, it's one of the greatest things in the world for - you know, for me just because I've been able to grow up with everything. The freedom. You know, in my eyes this is the greatest country in the world.

Kashmir belongs to the Kashmiris. Not to Indians. Not to Pakistanis.