Quotes & Sayings About National Symbols

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language. — Slobodan Milosevic

Israel must remove the two blue stripes from its national flag. The stripes on the flag are symbols of occupation. They signify Israel's borders stretching from the River Euphrates to the River Nile. — Mahmoud Al-Zahar

Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood. — Julian Baggini

The message of such silence is simple: "we the people" will no longer conspire in supporting the illusions that help corrupt leaders maintain control. By withholding our cheers and falling into silence, we take a small step toward withdrawing the consent that helps maintain abusive power. We no longer affirm, or pretend to affirm, that the national flags and religious symbols in which corrupt leaders wrap themselves have any meaning -- except as an implicit judgment on the duplicity of those leaders. — Parker J. Palmer

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking. — Sharon Waxman

We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols. — Henry Morgenthau Jr.

When terrorists attacked the symbols of our national unity and strength, they failed to realize that they were just symbols of our strength. The real strength of our nation comes from our people - not our buildings. — Michael Enzi

My commitment to the Republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia ... a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian. — Malcolm Turnbull

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. — Svetlana Boym

The monogram of our national initials, which is the symbol for our monetary unit, the dollar, is almost as frequently conjoined to the figures of an engineer's calculations as are the symbols indicating feet, minutes, pounds, or gallons ... This statement, while true in regard to the work of all engineers, applies particularly to that of the mechanical engineer ... — Henry R. Towne

From the U.S. Capitol Building to the White House, our national symbols that represent freedom to so many of us, were built by people who were anything but free. — Gary Ackerman

Such displays of the Australian spirit engender pride, regardless of background, religion and political persuasion. They are unifying ... This spirit of leadership should be reflected in our national symbols and one appropriate way to do that is by finally making the changes needed to make Australia a republic ... A country's history does not change because it takes a step forward, but its possibilities for the future do. — Larissa Behrendt

A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known. — Edward Sapir