Inspired by my abhorrence of Nationalism and wariness of Patriotism, some quotes:

[Tyler Durden]

I live in absolute abhorrence of Nationalism, and especially Nationalism wearing the mask of Patriotism. My Patriotism is to the WORLD and to ALL PEOPLE and ALL CREATURES. We cannot survive much longer as a species unless we come to this realization. I have been calling this philosophy DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM; perhaps a better name would be Benevolent Humanism, where we truly view all life as a trust, and view all threats to that life as the highest, and perhaps ONLY crime; from which all other evils come. ~Tyler Durden (Me)


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


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


Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them! ~Albert Einstein


To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. ~George Santayana

atriotism... is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. ~Adlai Stevenson

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. ~Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889


He loves his country best who strives to make it best. ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. ~Bertrand Russell


Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own. ~Seneca


Do not... regard the critics as questionable patriots. What were Washington and Jefferson and Adams but profound critics of the colonial status quo? ~Adlai Stevenson


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


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


Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. ~George Jean Nathan


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


I love America. I love the world. Brotherhood and sisterhood have no borders. My heart orbits the Earth, love cannot be measured in longitude or latitude. ~Valentine Sterling


Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. ~George Bernard Shaw


A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours. ~William R. Inge


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


Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. ~Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1934


To him in whom love dwells, the whole world is but one family. ~Buddha


I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family. ~Rosika Schwimmer


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


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 easy to understand in America - it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country. ~Calvin Coolidge


What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child? ~Lin Yutang


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


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. ~Montesquieu


I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world. ~Socrates


The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war. ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career


I couldn't help but say to , 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. find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. ~Ronald Reagan, 1985


Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.
~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959


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


Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill. ~Richard Aldington


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


Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious. ~Oscar Wilde


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


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, Declaration of Sentiments, Boston Peace Conference, 1838


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


Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. ~Guy de Maupassant


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


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, quoted by Tolstoy in Bethink Yourselves


It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary


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


AND LASTLY, ONE OF MY FAVORITES:



If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. ~Edward Morgan Forster

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. "Patriotism is the most foolish of passions, and the passion of fools."

Schopenhauer

Thanks for the quotes. K&R

[Tyler Durden]

2. No cover charge.

Lots of old faves, prefaced by my own work.

[AspenRose]

3. To the Greatest Page

K, R and bookmarked

[T.Ruth2power]

4. Here here

National mythos is imperative to keep the slaves from bearing full witness to their servitude.

Now we can feel a part of something without examimng what that something is.

Flag waving is for fools. It has consequences.

These consequences are not pretty.

[ThomCat]

5. It's a damned shame that the only time Internationalism

gets any support is in situations where it shouldn't, where there is a profit to be made by exploiting people "over there."

[Hydra]

6. Good quotes

"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first."

- Ambrose Bierce

[Tyler Durden]

9. GOTTA Love Ambrose Bierce.

A true Literary Genius.

[alittlelark]

7. K & R & Bookmarked

Great compilation!

[tuckessee]

8. American Patriots

“The American people, taken one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the middle ages”
H.L.Mencken

[Tyler Durden]

10. I don't know how I missed that one.

H.L. Mencken would be a saint if us atheists, agnostics, Socialists and other "fellow travelers" subscribed to that sort of thing.

[Hydra]

11. Brilliant! n/t

[lastliberalintexas]

16. Mencken is one of my favorites

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
~ H. L. Mencken

[FreedomRain]

12. Here's one from H.G. Wells

"A nation is in effect any assembly, mixture or confusion of people which is either afflicted by or wishes to be afflicted by a foreign office of its own, in order that it should behave collectively as if its needs, desires and vanities were beyond comparison more important than the general welfare of humanity."

-H.G. Wells , Outline of History


Great List!

[pingzing58]

13. "Those who cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it." Santayana.

[Prophet 451]

14. I wish I loved America

I used to but these days, I can't help feeling the world would be better off if The Mayflower had sunk.

Not that I have any real love of my own nation either. I seem to remember a Bill Hicks line that was along the lines of: "Someone asked me "Don't you love your country?" and I was, Well, my parents fucked here, why should I love that?". That's pretty much how I feel about Britain these days. We do some things better than other nations, we do quite a lot of things worse, the stupidity and sadism of the public makes me often wish that eugenics was less morally offensive, that's about it.

Really, I'm not sure there's a difference between patriotism and nationalism. Objectively, most nations have good and bad points. If one were to somehow evaluate those points rationally, I suspect Sweden, France or possibly Holland would be the best. Since (assuming we're not Swedish, French or Dutch), our own nation has nothing objectivaly to warrant support more than any other nation, surely patriotism, a love of one's country is nothing more than an egotistical response that this country should be loved and protected because I was born here.

I've heard it said that patriotism has always stood in the way of human brotherhood. I think that's probably the wrong way around. Rather, I think patriotism is most often simply an extension of our own ego, a way of saying "this country is special because I live here". In other words, the obstacle to human brotherhood isn't so much patriotism or it's bastard twin, nationalism. The obstacle to human brotherhood is humans, our inherant (for most of us) feeling that I is somehow worthier, more moral or more enlightened than you. Of course, most of us are neither especially great men nor especially evil ones. Most of us are just part of the ruck and run, the undifferentiated mass but we cannot accept that because if we do, we must also accept that all sentient life is equal, that the beggar on the streets of Kurdistan and the CEO masturbating atop his pile of ill-gotten gains are as deserving of help, sympathy or condemnation as any of us (and war and unregulated capitalism instantly die). So really, nationalism, patriotism, love of one's country is simply a projection of our own ego.

Of course, I suspect I may only be able to see all of this clearly because I'm mentally ill and currently off my meds. I'm also going to use that as an excuse for my typos or the fact that the above may have made no sense at all.

[Tyler Durden]

15. I see nothing unclear...and I'm ON my meds.

[AuntPatsy]

17. Very good thread, a must view considering out present day political circus.

[Tyler Durden]

18. Circus: an excellent word for it.

Every time I watch the machinations of Bush and his minions, it's like watching the clowns in center ring, racing around to "Merry go Round Broke down."