Quotes & Sayings About Nationalism And Identity

The new Turkish identity, which I call Muslim nationalism, is that of a pious Muslim Turk whose subjectivity and vision for the future is shaped by an imperial Ottoman past overlaid onto a republican state framework, but divorced from the Kemalist state project. — Jenny White

Nationalism as a thesis confuses (almost always deliberately) certain legitimate desires with illegitimate ones. People like to run their own affairs, and most people value the culture they were raised in, are proud of its achievements and wish it well; a significant degree of their sense of personal and group identity derives from it. All this is unexceptionable. But nationalists try to persuade their fellows that the existence of other groups and cultures somehow represents a challenge, and sometimes a threat, to what the natives of the home culture value. (From: Toward the Light of Liberty) — A.C. Grayling

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

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

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

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it ... — George Bernard Shaw

Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The weakness in traditional Scottish nationalism lay in its own inability to grasp that identity could not be the only factor in the march to independence. — Tariq Ali

Don't you ever just think of yourself as American? — Sabrina Vourvoulias

If you have free trade and free circulation of
capital and people but destroy the social state and all forms of progressive taxation, the temptations of defensive nationalism and identity politics will very likely grow stronger than ever in both Europe and the United States. Note, finally, that the less developed countries will be among the primary beneficiaries of a more just and transparent international tax system. — Thomas Piketty

Who are theologians? What kind of self-identity could or should a theologian claim? Should a theologian be a defender or transmitter of Christian _tradition_? What if the _tradition_ itself carries a dark side, implicitly or explicitly, bounded by religious or cultural superiorism, ethnocentrism, homophobism, exclusive nationalism, sexism, racism, and so forth? What kind of _identity_ would then justify my rule as theologian? This question has been lingering in my mind throughout the time I have been working on cosmopolitan theology. it may sound simple, but for me the identity issue has been fundamental. — Namsoon Kang

The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church. — Richard J. Mouw

Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general - they are too committed to the myth of pure evil). Conservatives want schools to teach lessons that will create a positive and uniquely American identity, including a heavy dose of American history and civics, using English as the only national language. Liberals are justifiably wary of jingoism, nationalism, and the focus on books by "dead white males," but I think everyone who cares about education should remember that the American motto of e pluribus, unum (from many, one) has two parts. The celebration of pluribus should be balanced by policies that strengthen the unum. — Jonathan Haidt

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. — Umberto Eco

Whenever a party tells you national identity matters more than anything else in politics, that nationalism can sort out all the other problems, then watch out, because you're on a road that can end with fascism. — C.J. Sansom

The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen east. The Mongol invasion had left a powerful mark on the Russian psyche. It was expressed in a deep anxiety about the mixed Eurasian roots of the people and it's culture, which made it easy for an educated liberal to convince themselves that this war was nothing less than a defense of Russia's European identity against the Asian hordes. — Orlando Figes