Nationalism Quotes

Comment l'Histoire pourrait-elle mieux servir la vie qu'en attachant ? leur patrie et aux coutumes de leur patrie les races et les peuples moins favorisés, en leur donnant des goûts sédentaires, ce qui les empêche de chercher mieux ? l'étranger, de rivaliser dans la lutte pour parvenir ? ce mieux? Parfois cela paraît être de l'entêtement et de la déraison qui visse en quelque sorte l'individu ? tels compagnons et ? tel entourage, ? telles habitudes laborieuses, ? tels stérile coteau. Mais c'est la déraison la plus salutaire, celle qui profite le plus ? la collectivité. Chacun le sait, qui s'est rendu compte des terribles effets de l'esprit d'aventure, de la fièvre d'émigration, quand ils s'emparent de peuplades entières, chacun le sait, qui a vu de près un peuple ayant perdu la fidélité ? son passé, abandonné ? une chasse fiévreuse de la nouveauté, ? une recherche perpétuelle des éléments étrangers. Le sentiment contraire, le plaisir que l'arbre prend ? ses racines, le bonheur que l'on éprouve ? ne pas se sentir né de l'arbitraire et du hasard, mais sorti d'un passé héritier, floraison, fruit , ce qui excuserait et justifierait même l'existence : c'est l? ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui, avec une certaine prédilection, le sens historique.Deuxième Considération intempestive. ch. 3

Friedrich Nietzsche

There was never a nation that became great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

Charles Dudley Warner

Nothingever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.

Charles Dickens

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them

George Orwell

Without a country, I am not a man.

Nawaf AlNasir AlSabah

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent, and is modest about it.

James Agate

Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.

Bob Geldof

You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.

Ernest Hemingway

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

Mark Twain

Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.

Mark Twain

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Mark Twain

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

Golda Meir

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England's many spurious gifts to the world.

Richard Aldington

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

James Joyce

The Jews have always been students, and their greatest study is themselves.

Albert Goldman

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

Albert Camus

Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

Samuel Johnson

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

Samuel Johnson

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

Samuel Johnson

With disadvantages enough to bring him to humility, a Scotsman is one of the proudest things alive.

Oliver Goldsmith