Nation And Nationalism Quotes & Sayings

I had seen how deep in nearly every West Indian, high and low, were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self-contempt; and how much important action they prompted. Everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the priviledges or even the separateness of his group. — V.S. Naipaul

The Book of Mormon proposes a new purpose for America: becoming a realm of righteousness rather than an empire of liberty. Against increasing wealth and inequality, the Book of Mormon advocates the cause of the poor. Against the subjection of the Indians, it promises the continent to the native people. Against republican government, it proposes righteous rule by judges and kings under God's law. Against a closed canon Bible and non-miraculous religion, the Book of Mormon stands for ongoing revelation, miracles and revelation to all nations. Against skepticism, it promotes belief; against nationalism, a universal Israel. It foresees disaster for the nation if the love of riches, resistance to revelation, and Gentile civilization prevail over righteousness, revelation and Israel. — Richard L. Bushman

By extrapolating a little from Freud, it becomes possible to think of nationalism as a kind of narcissism. A nationalist takes the neutral facts about a people - their language, habitat, culture, tradition and history- and turns these facts into a narrative, whose purpose is to illuminate the self-consciousness of a group, to enable them to think of themselves as a nation with a claim to self-determination. A nationalist, in other words, takes "minor differences"- indifferent in themselves- and transforms them into major differences. For this purpose, traditions are invented, a glorious past is gilded and refurbished for public consumption, and a people who might not have thought of themselves as a people at all suddenly begin to dream of themselves as a nation. — Michael Ignatieff

No nation can truly develop unless fanaticism, primitive superstitions and metaphysical non-sense are eradicated. — Abhijit Naskar

Nationalism - in other words, the dividing of the church into bodies - consisting of such and such a nation, is a novelty, not above three centuries old, although many dear children of God are found dwelling in it. — John Nelson Darby

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion ... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined ... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. — Benedict Anderson

The West in the voice of her thundering cannon had said at the door of Japan, Let there be a nation - and there was a Nation. And now that it has come into existence, why do you not feel in your heart of hearts a pure feeling of gladness and say that it is good? Why is it that I saw in an English paper an expression of bitterness at Japan's boasting of her superiority of civilization - the thing that the British, along with other nations, has been carrying on for ages without blushing? Because the idealism of selfishness must keep itself drunk with a continual dose of self-laudation. But the same vices which seem so natural and innocuous in its own life make it surprised and angry at their unpleasantness when seen in other nations. — Rabindranath Tagore

The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found. — Vasily Grossman

In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base. — Harold Cruse

Again Khomeini expresses this divide between the West and traditional Islam: "Don't listen to those who speak of democracy. They all are against Islam. They want to take the nation away from its mission. We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy, and such things." The jihadists rampaging in Syria and Iraq agree, which is why their goal is to restore the caliphate under which Islam dominated the region for centuries. — Anonymous

Because each nation has its own history of thieving and lies and broken faith, therefore there can only flourish international suspicion and jealousy, and international moral shame becomes anaemic to a degree of ludicrousness. The nation's bagpipe of righteous indignation has so often changed its tune according to the variation of time and to the altered groupings of the alliances of diplomacy, that it can be enjoyed with amusement as the variety performance of the political music hall. — Rabindranath Tagore

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never to follow the West in its acceptance of the organized selfishness of Nationalism as its religion, never to gloat upon the feebleness of its neighbours, never to be unscrupulous in its behaviour to the weak, where it can be gloriously mean with impunity, while turning its right cheek of brighter humanity for the kiss of admiration to those who have the power to deal it a blow. Some of the newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical qualities, while adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people. I felt they were right. Japan had been taught in a modern school the lesson how to become powerful. The schooling is done and she must enjoy the fruits of her lessons. — Rabindranath Tagore

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellemce, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident
or citizen
of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should
and need to
go home and get in line. — Donald J. Trump

I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra — Jose Rizal

Clever lies become matters of self-congratulation. Solemn pledges become a farce - laughable for their very solemnity. The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril. — Rabindranath Tagore

Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty. — George Will

Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other. — Louis De Bernieres

The oblivion, and I'll say even the historical error, are a key factor in the creation of a nation, to the extent that the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality. — Ernest Renan

No human heart is denied empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy. — Dayananda Saraswati

Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare - which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale. — Liddell Hart

It is good for everyone to know how to forget. — Ernest Renan

If you are religious, you believe that your religion is the 'right' one - and, in many cases, all others will be sent to hell. Similarly, a nationalist believes his or her nation is better or more advanced - and a racist believes that an inherent difference between each race make his or her ethnicity superior. All of these ideologies spawn the hate, philosophical disagreements, and prejudices that have been the catalysts for various atrocious acts throughout history. — David G. McAfee

I think even nation states should be and will be obsolete. I think nationalism will be seen in the future as a form of tribalism and I think what we call "Democracy" will be "Netocracy", where people, globally, can work on issues. — Deepak Chopra

It is perhaps dangerous to conclude too much about the character and intentions of a nation based on the snacks menu in a railway carriage, but I couldn't help wonder if Scottish nationalism hasn't gone a little too far now. I mean, these poor people are denying themselves simple comforts like KitKats and Cornish pasties and instead are eating neeps and foot medication on grounds of patriotism. Seems a bit unnecessary to me. — Bill Bryson

A nation's not a child, for God's sake ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed. — David Hewson

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet — George Orwell

Show me the heroes that the youth of your country look up to, and I will tell you the future of your country. — Idowu Koyenikan

Thanks to Lana Turner, Eleven Eleven, The Nation, LIT Magazine (USA), Critical Quarterly (UK), Beautiful Outlaw Press, no press, The Capilano Review, cv2, Rhubarb and Centre A Gallery (Canada). — Erin Moure

The sports pages are men's pages, although they are not presented as such. / ... / On foreign fields, the men win their trophies, or lose their honour, doing battle on the nation's behalf. The readers, mainly men, are invited to see these male exploits in terms of the whole homeland, and, thus, men's concerns are presented as if defining the whole national honour.
The parallel between sport and warfare seems obvious ... — Michael Billig

Ten responsible and rational young citizens are sufficient to clean up the mess of a thousand old superstitious citizens. — Abhijit Naskar

If Syria is to rise from the ashes it needs a united Arab world which has one thing on its agenda, not the falling of a dictator for we have seen many of those fall, but the reemergence of a prosperous Arab nation, one that is not reliant on foreign aid but is self-sustained and set on its way to become powerful once again. — Aysha Taryam

The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination. — Ernest Gellner

The path to the ethnic democratization of American society is through its culture, that is to say through its cultural apparatus, which comprises the eyes, the ears, and the "mind" of capitalism and is twentieth-century voice to the world. Thus to democratize the cultural apparatus is tantamount to revolutionizing American society itself into the living realization of its professed ideas. Seeing the problem in another way, to revolutionize the cultural apparatus is to deal fundamentally with the unsolved American question of nationality--Which group speaks for America and for the glorification of which ethnic image? Either all group images speak for themselves and for the nation, or American nationality will never be determined. — Harold Cruse

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. — George Orwell

There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe. — Nivedita Menon

Today even the dimmest of capitalist can see that the centralized nation-state, so promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population. Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it will come to envelop every centrally governed society ... If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for peace. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. The national idea depends on war. A general European war, with ever striking worker a traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map. The national idea would be reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from the swamp of the ruined Europe. — Thomas Pynchon

The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then become pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own. — Vasily Grossman

The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations, — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Borrowing other people's culture and adopting other people's way of life does destroy nation's self-respect which is the greatest asset a true citizen can enjoy more than food and clothes, more than all amenities and more than military glory. You can adopt a system of government and a way of life, but can you adopt the past history, travail and tradition out of which that system of government and a way of life were evolved? Can we adopt King Charles, King John, Magna Carta and civil wars and Cromwell as our own? They can always say "We evolved a system and a way of life", but we must always sing in refrain, "We borrowed them". Adopting a culture is not the same as adopting the use of a gadget. It is like tying other peoples' mangoes to your tree, while plucking and throwing away your own. How absurd! — Manasa Rao

It has already been noticed that the Nazis were not simple nationalists. Their nationalist propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never allowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics. Nazi "nationalism" had more than one aspect in common with the recent nationalistic propaganda in the Soviet Union, which is also used only to feed the prejudices of the masses. The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provincialism of the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their "movement," international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific territory. And — Hannah Arendt

How simple everything could seem if one looked only at the figures, those cold statistics that took no account of people's feelings and traditions. How much would be destroyed if men were to be treated as robots! What of the myriad of individual characteristics, passions, aspirations, triumphs and disappointments that together made one people different from another? How could anyone ignore all the different threads of experience that, over the centuries, had formed and deepened the differences that distinguished each nation? — Miklos Banffy

Generations can follow this destiny, can stay close to it or depart from it, having thus the capability of giving to their nation a maximum of life and honor or a maximum of dishonor and shame. Sometimes only isolated individuals, abandoned by their generation, can reach this destiny. In that moment, they are the people, they speak in its name. All the millions of dead and of the martyrs of the past are with them, as well as the nation's life of tomorrow. — Corneliu Codreanu

After Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France, and as Hegel had prescribed, with every house numbered so that bureaucratic government could pass its science to and collect sustenance from each. The states became the purveyors of education and sources of authority. They fostered the myth that people within their borders formed distinct races with different geniuses and destinies. All partook of Charles Darwin's ideology that life is an evolutionary struggle in which the fittest survive. — Angelo M. Codevilla

The events of that day would forever be remembered, and they stood together as a united Marridon, a nation that would lead in innovation and liberality, taking up the thread that had been left for them, the essence of selfless love woven along a national loom. — Michelle Franklin

There is no real conflict between nationalism and globalism. On the contrary: It is to the extent that a nation becomes more global in its achievements that it becomes admirable. — Nicos Hadjicostis

There are moments when masses establish contact with their nation's spirit. These are the moments of providence. Masses then see their nation in its entire history, and feel its moments of glory, as well as those of defeat. Then they can clearly feel turbulent events in the future. That contact with the immortal and collective nation's spirit is feverish and trembling. When that happens, people cry. It is probably some kind of national mystery, which some criticize, because they don't know what it represents, and others struggle to define it, because they have never felt it.
If the Christian mystery, which tends to ecstasy, is contact between Man and God, through, "ascent from human to divine nature", then the national mystery is nothing more than man's contact, or contact of mass, with the spirit of its nation. Not intellectually, for it could be the case with any historian, but live, in their hearts. — Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love. — Wilhelm Reich

Unfortunately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed. — Hannah Arendt

Your nation needs you. Your world needs you. So, use your education to become endowed with muscles of iron and nerves of steel. — Abhijit Naskar

But there was also a notable decline in many quarters of the world of jingoist rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism. There was a sense of the human species, billions of tiny beings spread over the world, collectively presented with an unprecedented opportunity, or even a grave common danger. To many, it seemed absurd for the contending nation states to continue their deadly quarrels when faced with a nonhuman civilization of vastly greater capabilities. There was a whiff of hope in the air. — Carl Sagan

Turkey's solidarity with Hamas is not, of course, based on Arab nationalism, which as a non-Arab nation it does not support. It is instead based on a definition of the Mideast conflict as one between Jews and Muslims, precisely the position of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. — Elliott Abrams

The original castle back in Edinburgh was the seat of Scottish nationalism. It symbolized everything to the diehard believers. Despite all the changes and defeats they endured, the castle stood solid at the center of their capital. They waited for generations for the Scottish nation to be properly reborn after their Bonnie Prince was lost. There were times when the cause seemed impossible, or even cursed; they regained their independence from the English only to lose it again right away with the formation of Federal Europe. — Peter F. Hamilton

Jewish nationalism means no more than recognition of the peoplehood of Israel, and of the propriety of that people's being a religio-cultural group in America, a nationality in Eastern Europe, and in Palestine an actualized nation. — Milton Steinberg

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. 'Automatic warfare' cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance.
(...)The advent of 'automatic warfare' should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations' claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people's fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant. — B.H. Liddell Hart