Patriotism Quotes - page 6
Though patriotism includes a sentimental, as it were a family, feeling for place, we can distinguish the ethical motive from the sentimental. At certain times in certain countries there has been a moral urgency to be patriotic when the actual or ideal policy of a man's nation has been a sine qua non for his conscience. But to-day patriotism, in so far as it means subordination to a specifically national policy, is superannuated. This war, we assume, is not being fought-not by most of us-for any merely national end; we are fighting it, primarily and clearly, for our lives, and secondarily, and, alas! vaguely, for a new international order.
Louis MacNeice
These days, to be "patriotic" means to wave the flag and shout slogans whenever the mass media deem it appropriate. It means to cheer the government whenever the government decides to use its cruise missiles or its smart bombs to kill a bunch of people in some other country, regardless of the reason. Instead of blood-based patriotism, today we have government-based patriotism. If you wave the flag and support the government, you're a patriot. If you don't like what the government is doing and you say so, then all of the flag-waving, slogan-shouting yahoos look at you as if you were the enemy.
William Luther Pierce
It proved to be essential to clear the site for the new building. This idea was a forerunner of futurism which exposed the relentless nature of its motivating power. Revolutions had started undercover, everything grew more complicated. Painting economical in its creative output was still very complicated and uneconomical in its expression. cubism and futurism seized upon the purity of form treatment and colour and built a complicated and extensive system with them combining them without any regard for harmony. The rebuilding of life cast aside the old concept of nations classes patriotism and imperialism which had been completely discredited.
El Lissitsky
Values in a free society are accepted voluntarily, not through coercion, and certainly not by law... every time we write a law to control private behavior, we imply that somebody has to arrive with a gun, because if you desecrate the flag, you have to punish that person. So how do you do that? You send an agent of the government, perhaps an employee of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Flags, to arrest him. This is in many ways patriotism with a gun – if your actions do not fit the official definition of a "patriot," we will send somebody to arrest you.
Ron Paul
I always maintain that the great service that education renders to democracy is the same service that we hope to gain from religion. They work, or ought to work, hand in hand. It is to keep the moral weights and measures true to standard; and not only true to standard-true to the highest standard. And let us have that applied impartially to all classes of the community from the top to the bottom. There are those who would empty the conception of the state of all moral qualities, and they would confine education to a bread-and-butter business. If I may paraphrase Nurse Cavell's dying words, such patriotism is not enough. Moral standards, applied as I suggest, are the surest way to achieve that fundamental social unity which is postulated by democracy.
Stanley Baldwin
Why did the [Roman] Empire come into existence at all, and why, having come into existence, did it perish?... Surely the character of the Roman played as great a part in the rise of the Empire as his character played in the fall?... to me the outstanding and peculiar strength of the Roman character lies in the words pietas and gravitas. These were the foundations of a patriotism which alone could carry the burden of Empire, a patriotism innate, a motive force of incalculable power, yet something at its best so holy that it was never paraded, sought no reward, was taken for granted, and had no single word to express it.
Stanley Baldwin
There are kind critics of the British race who say that we know how to combine three things-religion, patriotism and profit-better than any other nation. There are other and more complimentary explanations of our success in North America. The real fact lies in this: we transported our own stock into the new world...We had the inestimable advantage of being longer than any other country in Europe a free country, and our people pushed cross the seas in their little boats to plant the seed of freedom which had grown and flourished at home. In those people and their spirit of adventure you have the origins of Canada and of Manitoba.
Stanley Baldwin
For Greek democracy failed, and the reasons for its failure are full of instruction. The great ruling ideas which the Greeks gave to the world, ideas which England later was to absorb and spread over a quarter of the globe, freedom and self-government, social equality and civic patriotism, these were corrupted by demagogues and flatterers of the people. It was so fatally easy to think that freedom meant doing what you like, that one man was not only as good as another but equally able to fill any office whatsoever, that majorities could do no wrong, that you could make Utopian laws for your own country without regard to what other nations or other empires were doing...Freedom of speech was stifled and public men who refused to advocate pleasures for the public multitude were banished. Politicians rivalled one another in bribing the electorate.
Stanley Baldwin
[S]egments of the Right, who denounced phrases like "economic patriotism” when it passed Barack Obama's lips but nod and cheer when similar phrases come out of the mouths of "nationalists.” They see the state as the key to fostering a new social solidarity because it alone speaks for their new idol - or "strong god” - of the Nation. Passionate nationalists, like passionate socialists, ultimately believe that the State can love you, and if the right people take it over, the divisions that are inevitable in a free society will be knitted together by some government initiative. But that is not love, it is lust. It is a lust for power and victory for your vision over all others.
Jonah Goldberg
Patriots are few and far between when tyranny is strong. As the tyrant falls, patriots abound. But their patriotism is suspect. Accept no revolutionary leader who has not paid his dues with longevity, determination, sacrifice, defiance, dedication to unvarnished truth and love of his people.
David Lane (white nationalist)
I feel the deepest affliction at the news we have just received at the loss of our dear and inestimable friend Laurens. His career of virtue is at end. How strangely are human affairs conducted, that so many excellent qualities could not ensure a more happy fate! The world will feel the loss of a man who has left few like him behind; and America, of a citizen whose heart realized that patriotism of which others only talk. I feel the loss of a friend whom I truly and most tenderly loved, and one of a very small number.
Alexander Hamilton
Yes, Shakespeare foremost and forever (Darwin too). But also teach about the excellence of pygmy bushcraft and Fuegian survival in the world's harshest climate. Dignity and inspiration come in many guises. Would anyone choose the tinhorn patriotism of George Armstrong Custer over the eloquence of Chief Joseph in defeat?
Stephen Jay Gould
The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.
G. K. Chesterton
