Quotes About Nationalism

All those Dutch people who still look down on the British, scoff at England and its government of aging lords, call the English cowards, yet hate the Germans, should be given a good shaking, the way you'd plump up a pillow. Maybe that would straighten out their jumbled brains!

No one wants their dreams broken. Patriotism is a very powerful force.

when I hear people say "Six Flags," my mind fills in "Over Texas" and I have to resist the temptation to explain why "Six Flags." The six flags refer to the six flags of the countries that flew over Texas in history: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederate States of America.

Founder's Chic: Our Reverence for the Founding Fathers Has Gotten out of Hand, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2003.

When a single nation's armies are ordered against each other, all is lost.

The upshot of it has been that the spirit of the Past is now widely regarded amongst us as a purely immaterial force pumping a million times a day in the rose-pink heart of every true Irishman.

British and French patriotism are completely different emotions. Ours is a bit shamefaced and populist, theirs is the province of the intellectual.

It's hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary.

Nationalism is cured by traveling.

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.

An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India neither Hindu nor Muslim, but both. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.

Pakistan was created by Jinnah's will and Britain's willingness'—not by Nehru's wilfulness.

The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens.

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history—only an account of itself.

Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say 'I am British' the way a French African was encouraged to say 'Je suis français'.

subjugation of India under British rule.

He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and…glory in the possession of India'. Mahatma

The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained.

Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!

So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was 'neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service'.

At the beginning of the century, Ruskin declared that 'every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime, occurring under, or paralyzing, our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our national desire to live on the loot of India'.

control. The people's character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England's greatness and 'mission' in the world… As Pankaj Mishra has observed: European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which

the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British empire in India: To