"A patriot must
always
be ready to defend his country against his government."
Edward Abbey
"Patriotism is in
political
life what faith is in religion."
Lord Acton
"You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of
government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free
and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their
discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors,
that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for
objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time."
Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (1865-1957) Source: Free Speech in the United States, 1942
"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They
will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."
Henry Steele Commager, (1902-1998) Historian and
author, Source: Freedom and Order, 1966
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"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
"A politician will do anything to keep his job -- even become a patriot."
William Randolph Hearst
"Love your country, but never trust its government."
Robert Heinlein
"The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny;
flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to
the temporal interest of the clergy."
David Hume
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"One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person
of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more,
with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous."
Aldous Huxley
"The patriot volunteer,fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable
soldier on earth."
Thomas "Stonewall"
Jackson
"The tree of
liberty
must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants.
It is its natural manure."
Thomas Jefferson
"Patriotism
is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Dr. Samuel Johnson
"True
patriotism sometimes
requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which
it
does at another, and the motive which impels them -- the desire to do
right
-- is precisely the same."
Robert E. Lee
"Our
government
has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us
in a
continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the
cry of grave national
emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some
monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not
blindly rally behind it."
Gen. Douglas
MacArthur, (1880-1964) Supreme
Allied Commander, General of the U.S. Army
"Patriotism
is a
kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars
are
hatched."
Guy
de Maupassant (1850-1892) French
Author
"Samuel
Johnson's saying that patriotism is the last refuge of
scoundrels has some truth in it but not nearly enough. Patriotism, in
truth, is the great nursery of scoundrels, and its annual output is
probably greater than that of even religion. Its chief glories are the
demagogue, the military bully, and the spreaders of libels and false
history. Its philosophy rests firmly on the doctrine that the end
justifies the means--that any blow, whether above or below the belt, is
fair against dissenters from its wholesale denial of plain facts."
H.L. Mencken
"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."
George Jean Nathan
"There is no doubt
that
the government of this former republic is growing ever more tyrannical.
The question remains: When, if ever, will there again arise a breed of
patriots willing to step up to the plate?"
Lyn Nofziger
"A movement to
resist
tyranny demands a leader and no leader determined to resist tyranny and
to rally freedom-loving Americans has appeared anywhere on the
horizon.
I also know that power corrupts and many a rebellion against tyranny,
having
won the victory, has merely resulted in replacing the old brand of
tyranny
with a new brand. Indeed, never in history has there been a band
of patriots like the Founding Fathers, men who in the name of liberty defeated
a tyrant and then resisted the temptation to seize power for
themselves.
The chances that such a band or such a man as George Washington can
again
emerge to lead a new American Revolution and build a new nation
dedicated
to the principles of liberty and equality as God-given rights are
pretty
small."
Lyn Nofziger
"Patriotism is
usually
stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism."
George Orwell
"The
duty of a
patriot is to protect his country from the (federal) government."
Thomas Paine
"If
patriotism is "the last refuge of a scoundrel," it
is
not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of
patriotism ... but because
patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether."
Ralph Barton
Perry, (1910)
"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
"Patriotism
means to stand by
the
country.
It does not mean to stand by the president...."
Theodore
Roosevelt
"To
be a Christian
patriot ... requires us to be critical of acts
done by the United States that are illegal in terms of the Constitution
or unjust or immoral in terms of the higher law of God. A Christian
patriot is one who is faithful to his country in terms of a prior
faithfulness to God. Christians ought to be both the most vocal
supporters of the ideals that made America great and the most outspoken
critics of its failures. Party loyalty often pulls us down in this
regard. The activities of our government must not be judged in terms of
their political expediency but in terms of their moral legitimacy."
Mark
R. Rushdoony, 'The
Critical Patriot'
"Patriotism
is the willingness to kill and be killed
for trivial reasons."
Bertrand
Russell
"In war-time the word patriotism means suppression of truth."
Siegfred Sassoon, in 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer'
"War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and
patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent
covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly."
George Bernard Shaw, in 'Common Sense About the War'
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries
because you were born in it."
George Bernard Shaw
"What
is patriotism, if not fidelity
to your country's best traditions? And if "We the People,"
having spoken
through our Constitution, find our state officers ignoring our
fundamental
law, it is they who are disloyal and rebellious. They hold their power
in trust, conditionally and temporarily; they weren't born to
rule us,
but hold office at our pleasure. And if we allow them to abuse and
usurp
power with impunity, we have nobody to blame but ourselves."
Joe
Sobran, from
"A
Surfeit of Patriotism", March 2, 2002
"My
patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by
the notion that the
United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months'
campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state
like
Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American
standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to
build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a
representative."
William Graham
Sumner, The Conquest of
the United States by Spain [1898]
"During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade
often under the guise of patriotism."
Howard Thurman
"The
greater the state, the more wrong and cruel
its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its
power is founded."
Leo
Tolstoy
"Patriotism
in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning
is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's
ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity,
common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission
to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever
patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery."
Leo Tolstoy, Christianity and
Patriotism
"Men who
can undertake to fulfill with unquestioning submission all
that is decreed by men they do not know...cannot be rational; and
the governments - that is, the men wielding such power - can still less
be
reasonable. They cannot but misuse such insensate and terrible power
and cannot but be crazed by wielding it. For this reason peace between
nations cannot be attained by this reasonable method of conventions and
arbitrations so long as that submission of the peoples to governments,
which is always irrational and pernicious, still continues.
But the subjection of men to
government will always continue as
long as patriotism exists, for every ruling power rests on
patriotism - on the readiness of men to submit to
power..."
Leo
Tolstoy, Christianity and
Patriotism
"To destroy
governmental violence only one thing is needed: it is that
people should understand that the feeling of patriotism which alone
supports that instrument of violence is a rude, harmful, disgraceful,
and bad feeling, and above all is immoral. It is a rude feeling because
it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality
and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are
ready to inflict. It is a harmful feeling because it disturbs
advantageous and joyous peaceful relations with other peoples, and
above all produces that governmental organization under which power may
fall and does fall into the hands of the worst men. It is a disgraceful
feeling because it turns man not merely into a slave but into a
fighting ####, a bull, or a gladiator, who wastes his strength and his
life for objects which are not his own, but his government's. It is an
immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . .
. or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the
influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and
the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason
and conscience."
Leo
Tolstoy, Patriotism and
Government
"To be a
patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, " Our country, right or
wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that
phrase is an insult to the nation."
Mark Twain,
from "Glances
at History," 1906
"The
Gospel of
the Monarchical Patriotism is: "The King can do no
wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant
change in the wording: "Our Country, right or wrong!"
Mark Twain
"Patriotism is
supporting your country all the time, and your government when it
deserves it."
Mark Twain
"A
man
can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian
and a patriot--except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth,
the other with the heart. The spirit of Christianity proclaims the
brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not
been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite- the Christian
must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and
all insults he can conceive and utter- forgive these injuries how many
times?--seventy times seven--another way of saying there shall be no
limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of
Christianity. Well--Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly
definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the
brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book
every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as
softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog
and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line
or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise,
and hear him split the universe with is war-whoop. The spirit of
patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man's
line, it comes natural to him- he can live up to all its requirements
to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety
possible to him.
The prayers
concealed in what I have been saying is, not that patriotism should
cease and not that the talk about universal brotherhood should cease,
but that the incongruous firm be dissolved and each limb of it be
required to transact business by itself, for the future."
Mark
Twain,
from Mark
Twain's
Notebook
"We
teach
them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest
crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--exactly
as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We
teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt,
such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we
are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out
of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's
keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan."
Mark
Twain,
from Mark
Twain, a
Biography
"[Patriotism]
...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of
land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of
a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with
proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers"
who came to steal it and did--and became swelling-hearted patriots in
their turn."
Mark
Twain, from Mark
Twain's
Notebook
"In
the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and
hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for
then
it costs nothing to be a patriot."
Mark Twain
"Man
is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under
his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous
uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other
people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in
the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood of his hands and
works for "the universal brotherhood of man"- with his mouth."
Mark Twain,
from "The
Lowest Animal"
"Guard against the
postures
of pretended patriotism."
George Washington
"Revisiting the
Revolutionary
War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape
of
the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few
Americans
defying an empire."
George
Will