Patriotism

• 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

• "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 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 most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation." Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

• "[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

• "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.

• "To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography." - George Santayana