Quotes About Patriotism

What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!

The awful waste that patriotism necessitates ought to be sufficient to cure the man of even average intelligence from this disease. Yet patriotism demands still more. The people are urged to be patriotic and for that luxury they pay, not only by supporting their defenders, but even by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid worship of the world for which the well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the law of our beings. Compared with this, he concluded, thieving is an honorable pursuit.[5]

What, then, is patriotism? Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels, said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average working man.

Le patriotisme […] est une superstition créée artificiellement et entretenue par tout un réseau de mensonges et de faussetés ; une superstition qui enlève à l'homme tout respect pour lui-même et toute dignité, et accroît son arrogance et son mépris. En effet, mépris, arrogance et égoïsme sont les trois éléments fondamentaux du patriotisme.

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.58

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America

with a fading of the individual's creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination toward joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.

A purely state-based patriotism is not necessarily ineffective, since the very existence and functions of the modern territorial citizen-state constantly involve its inhabitants in its affairs, and, inevitably, provide an institutional or procedural 'landscape' which is unlike any other such landscape and is the setting for their lives, which it largely determines.

We teach history to instill in new generations the values of patriotism, citizenship, and love of country, but sometimes we must also remember that we teach history so that we can liberate ourselves from the past.

Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone and as irrational as a headless hen.

Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

There is no farm-state equivalent for intelligence, no geographic center of industry or interests that encourages legislators to focus on intelligence oversight to win voter support. As Michael Hayden told me, "No member ever gets a bridge built or a road paved by serving on the intelligence committee. It's an act of patriotism.

They burnt his flag," he finished on a sob. "Before I left, I asked my dad what happened to Kevin's flag, and he said he'd burnt it.

mon grand-père m'a dit que si le patriotisme se mesure en portant un drapeau, alors les bâtiments gouvernementaux sont patriotiques qu'autre chose

On croit mourir pour la patrie ; on meurt pour des industriels

I don't believe in God. My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.

The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no motherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.

WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.

PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND TO THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS, ONE NATION, UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.

For them, going where they were treated best did not mean being unpatriotic or abandoning their home. It was the embodiment of everything it meant to 'be an American.' Nothing has changed about that drive to explore and thrive in the world's final frontiers; and having that drive today is the furthest thing from being unpatriotic. What

Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.