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The hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation and its destiny.
-African Proverb
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A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
-Edward Abbey
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What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country.
-Joseph Addison
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It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.
-Alfred Adler
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Love of country is like love of woman -- he loves her best who seeks to bestow on her the highest good.
-Felix Adler
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It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.
-Baha'u'llah
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I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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True patriots we; for be it understood we left our country for our country's good.
-George Barrington
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Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Patriotism must be founded on great principals and supported by great virtue.
-Henry Bolingbroke
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Who saves his country violates no law.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Next to the love of God, the love of country is the best preventive of crime.
-George Borrow
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Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.
-James Bryce
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God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
-Luis Bunuel
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To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
-Edmund Burke
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Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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The love of one
-Pau (Pablo) Casals
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I am thankful to have had these ten weeks of quiet to get ready. Now I have had them and have been kindly treated here. I expected my sentence and I believe it was just. Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
Executed (shot) for helping allied soldiers to escape from Brussels to neutral territory in Holland during World War I.http://www.edithcavell.org.uk/
-Edith Cavell, Last words
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My country wrong or right, is like saying my mother, drunk or sober.
-G. K. Chesterton
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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.
-G. K. Chesterton
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Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
(note: Clinton borrowed from Eisenhower for this one)
-William Jefferson Clinton, First Inaugural Speech, January 20, 1993
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Many a bum show has been saved by the flag.
-George M. Cohan
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Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.
-Calvin Coolidge
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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
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The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.
-Marquis De Custine
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Our country right or wrong.
-Stephen Decatur
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Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.
-Stephen Decatur
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Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
-Denis Diderot
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Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Never was patriot yet, but was a fool.
-John Dryden
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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
-Will Durant
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Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
-Lawrence Durrell
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No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot.
-Albert Einstein
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This act of mine may mean years of separation from your family, so you must decide quickly whether you will go north or remain here.
-David G. Farragut, Said to his wife when he was sticking to the flag after Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861
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Patriotism has its roots deep in the instincts and the affections. Love of country is the expansion of dutiful love.
-D. D. Field
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The Noble Lord advocates Union, what doth such a union mean? When the Smaller unites with the greater, what happens? The greater absorbs and engulfs the lesser, it is ever thus and so will be! There are ten times as many English as Scots. Think you then, when the ten becomes eleven, the eleventh will partner the ten? Or, be swallowed up by the ten? Is this what my Lord of Stair wants? An end to Scotland? The most ancient nation in Christendom, a kingdom when England was but a medley of warring tribes! Scotland, from whence Christianity spread to the English. Scotland, a people with their own Kirk and laws, their freedoms, customs and pride. Is all that for which our forefathers fought for untold generations, to be merely thrown aside for a mess of trading privileges and navigation rights? I would rather that Scotland sank to the bottom of the ocean rather than we lost one least part of our cherished Independence and ages old identity!
-Andrew Fletcher, From the minutes of the Scottish parliament of 1703
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Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by patriotism I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
-Erich Fromm
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The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute.
-J. William Fulbright
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Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.
-Indira Gandhi
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The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind.
-William Lloyd Garrison
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What do the nationalists say about killers punishing murderers and thieves sentencing looters?
-Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet"
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I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
-Nathan Hale, Executed as a spy by the British. Last words spoken as a reply to Provost-Major William Cunningham when asked to make his dying, September 22, 1776
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I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; --neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
-Ernest Hemingway
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It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.
-E. J. Hobsbawm
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Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws, and asks no omen, but his country's cause.
-Homer
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My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor. In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbounded hope.
-Herbert Hoover
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It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one's country.
-Horace
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In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the Sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.
-Idi Amin
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Every good citizen makes his country's honor his own, and cherishes it not only as precious but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense and its conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.
-Andrew Jackson
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
-Henry James
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Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
-Samuel Johnson
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A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness.
This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.
Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.
My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?
For our freedom, said Davin.
No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first.
They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me.
Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant...
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
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... ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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 In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres56.html precedents to this quotation can be found under Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Warren Harding, and Kahlil Gibran
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
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Nationalism is the love which ties me to the blockheads of my country, to the insultors of my way of life, and to the desecrators of my language.
-Karl Kraus
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To read the papers and to listen to the news... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.
-Charles Kuralt
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When a nation is filled with strife, then do patriots flourish.
-Lao-Tzu
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Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
-Sinclair Lewis
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We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
-Abraham Lincoln, First inaugural address, March 4, 1861
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You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.
-Malcolm X
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God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.
-Giuseppe Mazzini
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O my Brothers! love your Country. Our Country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by, and with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others; a family which by its concentration upon a given spot, and by the homogeneous nature of its elements, is destined for a special kind of activity.
-Giuseppe Mazzini
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Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
-Herman Melville
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Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
-H. L. Mencken
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Patriotism is a arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
-George Jean Nathan
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Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.
-William Osler, Chauvinism in Medicine Address given to the Canadian Medical Association, Montreal, Canada. Reprinted in Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses, and Practitioners of Medicine. Birmingham, AL: Classics of Medicine Library; 1987, September 17, 1902
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Today the nations of the world may be divided into two classes -- the nations in which the government fears the people, and the nations in which the people fear the government.
-Amos R. E. Pinochet
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It is an obscene comparison - you know I am not sure I like it - but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck, he said. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions...
...It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole - and for all the right reasons - felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.'
-Dan Rather, admitting, that patriotism run amok was in danger of trampling the freedom of American journalists to ask tough questions
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Some reformers may urge that in the ages distant future, patriotism, like the habit of monogamous marriage, will become a needless and obsolete virtue; but just at present the man who loves other countries as much as he does his own is quite as noxious a member of society as the man who loves other women as much as he loves his wife. Love of country is an elemental virtue, like love of home.
-Theodore Roosevelt
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A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.
-Theodore Roosevelt
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Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
-Bertrand Russell
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A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
-George Santayana
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Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
-Sir Walter Scott
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I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, make me less of an American.
-Pete Seeger, from testimony for the House of Un-American Activities Committee, August 15, 1955
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Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
-George Bernard Shaw
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You'll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
-George Bernard Shaw, O'Flaherty, V.C.
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Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
-Adlai Stevenson
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Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion, but the tranquil ad steady dedication of a lifetime.
-Adlai Stevenson
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We talk a great deal about patriotism. What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power
-Adlai Stevenson, Speech to the American Legion Convention in New York City, August 27, 1952
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I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided b
-George Washington
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He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.
-H. G. [Herbert George] Wells
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How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
-Edith Wharton
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The things that the flag stands for were created by the experiences of a great people. Everything that it stands for was written by their lives. The flag is the embodiment not of sentiment, but of history.
-Woodrow Wilson
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Books about Patriotism
