PATRIOTISM QUOTES
quotations about patriotism
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- Such is the patriot's boast, where'er we roam,
- His first, best country ever is, at home.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, The Traveller
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson
Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
EMMA GOLDMAN, Anarchism and Other Essays
Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest,” but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS, Pieces of Eight
I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter, Apr. 21, 1778
We’re being sold a brand new idea of patriotism. It never occurred to me that patriotism had to be advertised. Patriotism is something you deeply felt. You didn’t have to wear it on your lapel or show it in your window or on a bumper sticker. That kind of patriotism does not appeal to me at all.
SAM SHEPARD, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2004
Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks.
RICHARD ALDINGTON, The Colonel's Daughter
The essence of patriotism is the sacrifice of personal interest to public welfare.
WILLIAM H. BURNHAM, New Outlook, vol. 90
Patriotism! It is used to define so many diversities, to justify so many wrongs, to compass so many ends, that its life is killed out; it becomes a dead word in the vocabulary--a blank counter, to be moved to any part of the game; and that flag which, streaming from the mast-head of our ship of state, striped with martyr-blood, and glistening with the stars of lofty promise, should always indicate our worldwide mission, and the glorious destinies that we carry forward, is bandied about in every selfish skirmish, and held up as the symbol of every political privateer.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one's own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful.
LEO TOLSTOY, letter to a Polish journalist, Sept. 1895
While patriotism is often lauded as an unquestionable value, the status of patriotism is a problem for many thoughtful people. It is particularly troublesome for people who care about the common good but are alienated by the all too frequent use of patriotism and patriotic symbols to stifle debate, tarnish the images of rival candidates, or arouse popular support for aggressive military policies.
STEPHEN NATHANSON, introduction, Patriotism, Morality, and Peace
Patriotism is a thing of the heart. A man is a patriot if his heart beats true to his country.
CHARLES E. JEFFERSON, "Ethical Aspects of Conscription and the War"
The word patriotism, or its equivalents and derivations, is upon everyone's lips at the present time. It is a magic word which is thought by most people to cover any multitude of sins. To be patriotic in whatever cause is tantamount to being virtuous, while no worse charge can be brought against a man in popular estimation than to say he is unpatriotic.
ERNEST BELFORT BAX, Essays in Socialism
The patriot labours, not for signs of success, but for the accomplishment of that which is right. He must be painstaking, if his labours are to prove useful; and he must be patient, if his work is to be crowned with completion. Reckless, random action is not the sign of patriotism, and, whether it be borne with a longer or a shorter period, it always ends in collapse.
W. GLENNY-CRORY, Time: A Monthly Magazine, 1886
In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering; and ... consequently, this feeling should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.
LEO TOLSTOY, Essays and Letters
Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.
MAX EASTMAN, "What Shall We Do With Patriotism?"
Part of the problem with extreme patriotism is that it makes the support of one's country and its policies unconditional. Moderate patriots, on the other hand, see that taking morality seriously requires that our commitment to our country be conditional in two ways. First, the actions or policies of a government must be worthy of support or, at least, must not be serious violations of morality. When nations behave immorally, patriots need not support them.
STEPHEN NATHANSON, Patriotism, Morality, and Peace
Patriotism is like religion--it is best when least ostentatious.
CHARLES E. JEFFERSON, "Ethical Aspects of Conscription and the War"
A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle: and patriotism is loyalty to that principle. In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely associated with the soil and the symbols of the country. But the secret sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears a lock of her hair upon his heart.
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, oration at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., Jul. 20, 1857
Patriotism is the admission that people who share a land, a place, and a history have a special obligation to that place and to each other.
DAVID EHRENFELD, Becoming Good Ancestors
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ”Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by ”patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare –never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
ERICH FROMM, The Sane Society
Patriotism is a salt against rottenness, a glorious spur to high endeavour; it recovers the half-obliterated virtue of loyalty, calls every man to service, and ennobles great and small alike.
PERCY DEARMER, 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, Anarchism and Other Essays
Patriotism, to be, posits a complex relationship of self-destruction: it legitimizes actions taken in the name of basic political principles that traduce those same principles; it accords itself a special, perhaps higher, authority to monopolize politics and to silence, marginalize, and ultimately disable opposition, particularly when opposition matters most; it induces affective states that lead to plans and policies otherwise objectionable or even unthinkable; it conceals the damage that it does through professions of love and declamations of terrible necessity that adherents would recognize; it emerges as a primap, preemptive force precisely because polities cannot face the cruelties, injustices, and exclusions that characterize them. Thus perhaps patriotism cannot but be insistent, imperitival, and univocal. In sum, patriotism proves itself to be anything but indispensable to democracy; rather democracy's future depends on its emergence from patriotism's self-obsessive grip.
STEVEN JOHNSTON, The Truth about Patriotism
When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal entry, Dec. 10, 1824
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Left Hand of Darkness
Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
Those who love their country never wish to rule it.
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
Browse Patriotism Quotes II
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