Something to think about while waving the flag tomorrow:
- "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it". ~ George Bernard Shaw
- "Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception." ~ George Orwell
- "Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism" is its cult. ~ Erich Fromm
- "A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors". ~ W. R. Inge
- "Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress." ~ Thorstein Veblen
"There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization." ~ Oscar S. Strauss
- "Nationalism ... is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you." ~ Dan Fried
- "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." ~ Albert Einstein
- "Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill." ~ R. Aldington
- "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “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
- “(Nationalism is) a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands” ~ Howard Zinn
- “Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched.” ~ Guy de Maupassant
- “Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “Patriotism - the virtue of the vicious.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
See also: Australia Day — No time to celebrate by Jay McDonald
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