Reply #11: Quotes on patriotism. [View All]

[Mnemosyne]

"One of the great attractions to patriotism, it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of a nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat while feeling we're profoundly virtuous." : Aldous Huxley

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"A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors." : W. R. Inge

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"Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone and as irrational as a headless hen." -Ambrose Bierce

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"Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched." : Guy de Maupassant

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"Patriotism is a menace to liberty.": Emma Goldman

"Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy." -George Bernard Shaw

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Patriotism is a superstition, one far more injurious, brutal and inhumane than religion." -Gustave Herve

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"Patriotism - the virtue of the vicious." -Oscar Wilde

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"Patriotism is a survival from barbarous times which must not only be evoked and educated but which must be eradicated by all means - by preaching, persuasion, contempt and ridicule." -Leo Tolstoy

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"You'll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race." -George Bernard Shaw

"A patriot sets himself apart in his own country under his own flag, sneers at other nations and keeps an army of uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries and keep them from grabbing slices of his. In the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' - with his mouth." : Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal

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"This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism." : Albert Einstein

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"Patriotism means advocating plunder in the interests of the privileged class of your particular country. The time will soon come when calling someone a patriot will be the deepest insult." -Ernest. B. Bax

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man." -Hannah Arendt, The Origins Of Totalitarianism p.227

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"Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self-evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and learned people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent and elevating." : Leo Tolstoy

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"Blind patriotism has been kept intact by rewriting history to provide people with moral consolation and a psychological basis for denial." -William H. Boyer

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"Patriotism is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a web of lies and falsehoods, robbing us of our dignity and increasing our arrogance and conceit." : Emma Goldman



"What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

You don't want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined." :

From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)