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Patriotism Quotations




Joseph Addison (top)
How beautiful is death, when earn'd by virtue! Who would not be that youth? What pity is it That we can die but once to serve our country!
- Joseph Addison


Unknown Author (top)
If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag.
- Unknown Author


James Bryce (top)
Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.
- James Bryce


Buddha (top)
To him in whom love dwells, the whole world is but one family.
- Buddha


Pablo Casals (top)
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
- Pablo Casals


Gilbert Keith Chesterton (top)
"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


Sir Winston Churchill (top)
When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
- Sir Winston Churchill


Arthur C. Clarke (top)
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


Calvin Coolidge (top)
Patriotism is easy to understand in America - it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.
- Calvin Coolidge


George William Curtis (top)
A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.
- George William Curtis


Eugene V. Debs (top)
I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
- Eugene V. Debs


Albert Einstein (top)
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!
- Albert Einstein
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
- Albert Einstein


Ralph Waldo Emerson (top)
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson


Hamilton Fish (top)
If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.
- Hamilton Fish


Harry Emerson Fosdick (top)
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


William Lloyd Garrison (top)
Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.
- William Lloyd Garrison


Charles de Gaulle (top)
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
- Charles de Gaulle


S.I. Hayakawa (top)
Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.
- S.I. Hayakawa


Homer (top)
It is not unseemly for a man to die fighting in defense of his country.
- Homer
The single best augury is to fight for one's country.
- Homer


William Ralph Inge (top)
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.
- William Ralph Inge


Robert Greene Ingersoll (top)
He loves his country best who strives to make it best.
- Robert Greene Ingersoll


Samuel Johnson (top)
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
- Samuel Johnson


John F. Kennedy (top)
And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
- John F. Kennedy


Abraham Lincoln (top)
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.
- Abraham Lincoln


Guy de Maupassant (top)
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
- Guy de Maupassant


Francis John McConnell (top)
We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us..... The old "manifest destiny" idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can - and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations.
- Francis John McConnell


George Meredith (top)
The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.
- George Meredith


Baron de Montesquieu (top)
If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident.
- Baron de Montesquieu


George Jean Nathan (top)
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
- George Jean Nathan


Blaise Pascal (top)
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
- Blaise Pascal


George S. Patton (top)
Don't be a fool and die for your country. Let the other sonofabitch die for his.
- George S. Patton


Ronald Reagan (top)
I couldn't help but say to Mr. Gorbachev, just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.
- Ronald Reagan


Bertrand Russell (top)
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
- Bertrand Russell


George Santayana (top)
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
- George Santayana


Lucius Annaeus Seneca (top)
Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca


George Bernard Shaw (top)
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
- George Bernard Shaw
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
- George Bernard Shaw


William Shenstone (top)
The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.
- William Shenstone


Socrates (top)
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.
- Socrates


Adlai E. Stevenson (top)
Do not... regard the critics as questionable patriots. What were Washington and Jefferson and Adams but profound critics of the colonial status quo?
- Adlai E. Stevenson
Patriotism... is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai E. Stevenson


Thucydides (top)
A private man, however successful in his own dealing, if his country perish is involved in her destruction; but if he be an unprosperous citizen of a prosperous city, he is much more likely to recover. Seeing, then, that States can bear the misfortunes of individuals, but individuals cannot bear the misfortunes of States, let us all stand by our country.
- Thucydides


Mark Twain (top)
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
- Mark Twain
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. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.
- Mark Twain


Voltaire (top)
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
- Voltaire


Earl Warren (top)
The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.
- Earl Warren


Oscar Wilde (top)
Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious.
- Oscar Wilde


Malcolm X (top)
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
- Malcolm X


Lin Yutang (top)
What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
- Lin Yutang