Quotes & Sayings About Nationalism

The most visible and often tragic sacrifice of proletarian socialism - not to mention internationalism - on the altar of nationalism, of course, has been by the states that proclaim themselves to be, or to aspire to become, socialist. — Andre Gunder Frank

I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language. I — Robert Lane Greene

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

Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, - with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance, - the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment, - that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies. — Rabindranath Tagore

In modern times, nationalism is the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm, and that nationalist fervor must be tapped if the drastic changes projected and initiated by revolutionary enthusiasm are to be consummated. — Eric Hoffer

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

If Nepal is to become a new Nepal, she must first become free from ethnic segregation. — Santosh Kalwar

The existence of excessive nationalism is a symptom of a deeper problem in the collective consciousness, which is continually being exploited. — Bryant McGill

Race, Religion, Ethnic Pride, Nationalism does nothing but teach you how to hate people you have never met — Doug Stanhope

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

The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few. — Niall Ferguson

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

What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is in essence, simply human nature. All the worlds nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another. The foundation of any national character is human nature. The foundation of national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallisation of it. — Vasily Grossman

Our internationalism is the driver of our nationalism. — Alex Salmond

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar — Marshall McLuhan

Individual effort is good but collective effort is better. We need a NETWORK of nation builders — Fela Durotoye

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 not posing these questions only to the world at large. I query us who own Christ as our life. Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Is there not an obligation upon us to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God is we want to live in his wonderful peace? — Richard J. Foster

Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Zionism is only around 100 years old. It is the transformation from religion to nationalism, to materialism created by non-religious Jews who hated their religion. The reason why they use the name Israel, the Star of David, hijacking, stealing the identity of Judaism and the Jewish people is in order to gain a legitimacy for their existence that should lead people to say, 'oh, it is God given to them' and that they should use fear and intimidate people from speaking out against their actions because they will call those that do anti Semitic; it couldn't be anything further from the Truth. — Yisroel Dovid Weiss

Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull. — Wilhelm Reich

For thousands to do to death a few hundreds is no bravery. It is worse than cowardice. It is unworthy of nationalism, of any religion. — Mahatma Gandhi

IT'S NOT RACIST
TO BE PROUD
OF YOUR COUNTRY!'

no, but it is fucking
stupid
to think it makes
you a better man. — Andy Carrington

Nonetheless, there is one important way that American nationalism does closely resemble German nationalism. Since shortly after the republic's founding, Americans have nurtured a very strong belief that the United States is a special nation, destined not only to take its place among nations but also to be the exemplar of what nationhood should be. — Brian E. Fogarty

It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals. — David Cronenberg

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America. — Pankaj Mishra

It was [the concept of] nationalism that Indonesia was established on. Not the Javanese, not the Sumatran, not the Bornean, Sulawesi, Bali or others, but the Indonesian, that together became the foundation of one nationale staat (nation-state). — Sukarno

I am devoting my lecture in this seminar to a discussion of the possibility that we are now entering a Jewish century, a time when the spirit of the community, the non-ideological blend of the emotional and rational and the resistance to categories and forms will emerge through the forces of anti-nationalism to provide us with a new kind of society. I call this process the Judaization of Christianity because Christianity will be the vehicle through which this society becomes Jewish. — Martin A. Siegel

C" is for colonies
Rightly we boast
that of all the great nations
Great Britain has most! — Mrs. Ernest Ames

Why do I dislike nationalism? First it starts with 'birds of a feather flock together' and it gradually becomes more a case of 'my dog is better than your dog' - with knives in it... — Christina Engela

Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of the future. — Chester Middlebrook Pierce

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

The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. — Yuval Noah Harari

In the new Europe, in any case, nationalism is something of an anomaly, given that the drive is to the elimination of national boundaries and national sovereignty. — Theodore Dalrymple

The old sporadic fanaticism of religious hatred had been skillfully perverted into the cold, steady fanaticism of national hate. — Franz Werfel

Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Nationalism had now replaced neighborliness. — Adriana Trigiani

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything. — William Golding

We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

I'm a Canadian. Outside Canada I carry the flag. Canadian nationalism isn't as insidious as American nationalism, though. It's good natured. It's all about maple syrup, not war. — Feist

Peace-phobia is the outcome of nationalism and religion; while homophobia is the outcome of traditions and religion. — M.F. Moonzajer

Nationalism and ethnic pride, in the long run, delay human development, and the misery they cause must be recognized. If enough people saw that , maybe we wouldn't have so many wars. — Harvey Pekar

I have always been conscious of the importance and the strength of nationalism, and this has led me straight to the acknowledgment of the nationalism of the Palestinian people. — Uri Avnery

Dylan Thomas, asked what he thought of Welsh Nationalism, replied in three words, two of which were 'Welsh Nationalism.' — Avram Davidson

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

No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche. — Walter Kaufmann

I do not for a moment suggest that Japan should be unmindful of acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know that the real power is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man who wields those weapons — Rabindranath Tagore

But the old 1840s split between the religious, patriotic, Slavophile establishment and the progressive, humane, revolutionary Westernizers was giving way to the exacerbated conflict between the alienated positivist radicals of the 1860s who adopted the name Turgenev had given them, Nihilists, and those who thanked Russian Nationalism, Orthodoxy and Autocracy for the bloodless liberation of the serfs, introduction of trial by jury, reduction of the draft from twenty-five to five years, partial decentralization of — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins. — Gideon Haigh

The only good produced by the disappearance of Africville was the appearance of a conscious black nationalism ... In this regard, Consecrated Ground is the heir of fierce, vengeful, and epic activism. — George Elliott Clarke

Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead — George Robertson, Baron Robertson Of Port Ellen

Many people tell me that I should become a politician but I tell them no I want to do something good for the nation. — Amit Abraham

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. — Michael Ignatieff

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. — Romain Gary

A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation. — Ronald Reagan

Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism. — Ernest Gellner

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

Nationalism is a distorting mirror in which believers see their simple ethnic, religious, or territorial attributes transformed into glorious attributes and qualities. — Michael Ignatieff

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism
the idolatry of the 20th century. — Cornel West

Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded — Hisham Matar

It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country. — Graham Greene

My love of nationalism is that my country may become free, and if need be, the whole of the country die, so that the human race may live. — Mahatma Gandhi

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

We hear a lot about Palestine now; it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness. — Victor Klemperer

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

Nationalism, like virtue, has its own reward. — Mahatma Gandhi

I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field; it's in contention with a lot of different things. — Peter Singer

The culmination of every supreme nationalism is a consummate universalism. — Nicos Hadjicostis

The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species. — Carl Sagan

It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn't matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it's still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word 'love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or 'fear', or 'suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division. — Krzysztof Kieslowski

But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile. — Patrick O'Brian

Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song. — G.K. Chesterton

On Pt. K.L. Misra
To write about him is to write about Greatness. To discuss him is to discuss Intellectual Brilliance. To think of him is to think of Modesty, Simplicity and Lucidity. To remember him is to remember Nationalism at its finest hour. He was not one of those who merely achieved greatness nor certainly one of those upon whom greatness was thrust-he was in fact born great. - Siddharth Shankar Ray, Senior Advocate — Munindra Misra

Bosnia is a complicated country: three religions, three nations and those 'others'. Nationalism is strong in all three nations; in two of them there are a lot of racism, chauvinism, separatism; and now we are supposed to make a state out of that. — Alija Izetbegovic

The passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life. — Alexis De Tocqueville

...the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. — Olaf Stapledon

Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world. — Douglas MacArthur

The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw. — Norman Davies

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

France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound. — Victor Hugo

Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity. — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

We must plant trees, grow gardens instead of lawns, ride bicycles when we can and support responsible local businesses over big brands. — Bryant McGill

Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder - one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking - cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on - have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power. — Howard Zinn

Why must I cling to the customs and practices of a particular country forever, just because I happened to be born there? What does it matter if its distinctiveness is lost? Need we be so attached to it? What's the harm if everyone on earth shares the same thoughts and feelings, if they stand under a single banner of laws and regulations? What if we can't be recognized as Indians any more? Where's the harm in that? No one can object if we declare ourselves to be citizens of the world. Is that any less glorious? — Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay

Patriotic duty and the disease of nationalism lure us to deny our common humanity — Chris Hedges

Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin. — Muammar Al-Gaddafi

Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many. — Arundhati Roy

Religion and nationalism? I defecate on the altar of religious conviction, and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride. — Ian Martin

The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century. — Harold Innis

Those policies [of Jean-Marie Le Pen ]I find repellent. I believe many people right across consist the world do. There is no future in that type of narrow minded racism and nationalism. — Rachel Maddow

Violent nationalism, otherwise known as imperialism, is a curse. — Mahatma Gandhi

The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world. — Suki Kim

Patriotism, whether it is of the Western kind, or of the Eastern kind, is the same, a poison in human beings that is really distorting thought. So patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease. When, in time of war, the whole world talks of patriotism, you will know the falseness of it, and therefore you will act as a true human being — Jiddu Krishnamurti

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or 'bad' ... By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be 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. — George Orwell

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer. — Voltaire

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. — George Orwell

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man. — Hannah Arendt

Black America "isn't just as fissured as white America; it is more so," wrote Gates. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor's guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism - something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32 — Jason L. Riley