Nationalism Quotes

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. ‘Automatic warfare’ cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance. (...)The advent of ‘automatic warfare’ should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations’ claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people’s fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant.

~ B.h. Liddell Hart

The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Nationalism is a form of cultural self-centeredness, and as a collective thought-form, can only exist because the dominant in-group is itself comprised of self-centered and narcissistic individuals.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.

~ Richard J. Mouw

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

Nationalism and socialism as actually lived and applied in the 20th century are the same thing (and in the 18th and 19th century, nationalism was often a force for classical liberalism!). It’s all a kind of reactionary tribalism (another “ism” which becomes poisonous quickly as you up the dosage). When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. When you socialize an industry you nationalize it. Yes, international socialism rejected this formulation. And that’s why international socialism failed! People wanted to be Germans or Russians or Italians and they wanted to be socialists. Even the Soviet Union embraced national-socialism (socialism in one country) because that 'workers of the world unite' crap wouldn't fly. After Stalin, no Communist or socialist regime failed to exploit nationalism to one extent or another.

~ Jonah Goldberg

The most visible and often tragic sacrifice of proletarian socialism - not to mention internationalism - on the altar of nationalism, of course, has been by the states that proclaim themselves to be, or to aspire to become, socialist.

~ André Gunder Frank

The sports pages are men's pages, although they are not presented as such. /.../ On foreign fields, the men win their trophies, or lose their honour, doing battle on the nation's behalf. The readers, mainly men, are invited to see these male exploits in terms of the whole homeland, and, thus, men's concerns are presented as if defining the whole national honour.The parallel between sport and warfare seems obvious...

~ Michael Billig

5 mins after your birth, they decide your name, nationality, religion & sect & you spend rest of your life defending something you didn't choose.

~ Nilesh Jain

I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins.

~ Gideon Haigh

I am pain-stricken to say, since the moment I was born, I have found nothing extraordinary in this ancient land of greatness to be exceptionally proud of. I am not a proud Indian. India at its present condition has given me no reason to feel proud.However, I do feel proud of the ancient Indians, just like I feel proud of the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians and so on. Scientists are beyond borders, just like the ancient scientists of India, whom you prefer to call as sages.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities.We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

~ Sami Ahmad Khan

I am not red or blue. I am red, white and blue. Those are the same colors in my body (my heart, blood and veins). I am only human, and the human race is the only race in which I am an active participant - mind, body and soul.

~ Suzy Kassem

... [T]he other lesson history has taught us - that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassion ... that the fanatical shouts of the bullies of the world are invariably silenced by the unified voices of decency that rise up to meet them.

~ Dan Brown

This two-track plan of nationalism and development (in China) is a historically powerful weapon.

~ Patrick Mendis

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.

~ Ernest Gellner

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

~ James Joyce

I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able vicariously to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat what's more with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

~ Aldous Huxley

Patriotism is not short frenzied outbursts of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedicaton of a lifetime.

~ Adlai Stevenson

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

~ Clarence Darrow

A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.

~ Ernest Renan

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man.

~ Mark Twain

The French have a passion for revolution but an abhorrence of change.

~ Old Saying

God made the ocean but the Dutch made Holland.

~ Dutch Proverb

The Creator made Italy with designs by Michelangelo.

~ Mark Twain

Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests.

~ Rolf Hochhuth

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

There is Ontario patriotism Quebec patriotism or Western patriotism each based on the hope that it may swallow up the others but there is no Canadian patriotism and we can have no Canadian nation when we have no Canadian patriotism.

~ Henri Bourassa

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

~ Marianne Moore

The mind supplies the idea of a nation but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams.

~ André Malraux

My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Paris.

~ Karl Beveridge

A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and hope to do great things together in the future.

~ Frank Underhill

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.

~ William Faulkner

Ireland is a fatal disease fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen.

~ George Moore

In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.

~ Arthur Henderson

I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.

~ Juan Cole

Independence did not mean chauvinism and narrow nationalism.

~ Said Musa