Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix, 1830) is a well known example of nationalist art.
I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Nationalism is devotion to one's ethnos (Latin nātiō). Often used interchangeably with patriotism, which is devotion to one's fatherland (Greek patria).

CONTENT: A-D , E-H , I-L , M-P , Q-T , U-Z , See also , External links

Quotes

It is possible, in the interests of a false religion (such as Nationalism or Fascism) to avert one's eyes from the plain fact of human brotherhood; but the fact stubbornly remains, and we ignore it at our peril. We are all in the same boat, and we live in the shadow of a common doom. ~ Gerald Bullett
Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none. ~ Stuart Chase
If you don’t offer people a positive, uplifting nationalism, they will grab the nasty one. History and recent events have shown us that. ~ David Brooks
Asked if he sees himself as a German or as a Jew, Albert Einstein replied, "It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease... measles of mankind."

A - D

  • It is possible, in the interests of a false religion (such as Nationalism or Fascism) to avert one's eyes from the plain fact of human brotherhood; but the fact stubbornly remains, and we ignore it at our peril. We are all in the same boat, and we live in the shadow of a common doom.
  • Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none.
    • Stuart Chase, quoted in Pennsylvania Technology, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1990, p. 11
  • 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.
  • The only possible foundation for a better social structure is the existing order, of which the contemporary system of nationalized states forms the foundation.

E - H

If you think in terms of people divided up into countries, you won't follow me. The idea of countries is going by the boards. Young people are getting wonderfully uprooted and they're too strong to get sucked into this 'country' crap. ~ Buckminster Fuller
  • Civic nationalism appeals to universal values, such as freedom and equality. It contrasts with “ethnic nationalism”, which is zero-sum, aggressive and nostalgic and which draws on race or history to set the nation apart. In its darkest hour in the first half of the 20th century ethnic nationalism led to war.
  • I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.
    • Albert Einstein, in a letter to Alfred Kneser (7 June 1918); Doc. 560 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8
  • I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult.
  • Novelists...are aware that there are two important views as to the future of civilisation. One view believes that civilisation will continue to develop on the basis of private property, war and insane egotism expressed in the dictatorial nationalist state. The other view believes that humanity is fighting for a new series of values based on social property, which shall banish war, destroy nationalism, and replace it by the free growth of healthy nations co-operating with one another in a world civilisation.
    • Ralph Fox, The Novel and the People (1937), reprinted in Patrick Deane, History in Our Hands : A Critical Anthology of Writings on Literature, Culture and Politics from the 1930s, Leicester University Press, 1998
  • Nationalism is like cheap alcohol: First, it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, and then it kills you.
  • Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism" is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by "patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare—never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
  • The rifts between Shia and Sunni, Eastern Orthodox and Catholic, Israelis and Palestinians, Tibetans and Chinese, obviously have real political, theological, or economic substance behind them, but they are often reduced to symbolism. If you study the history of nationalism, it is often a story of symbols. What flag shall we fly? What icon shall we mount? What books will we revere — or burn?
  • Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition.
  • The fact is that the world we live in was made by nationalism. Nationalism is the cultural framework of modernity. Modern consciousness is national consciousness. This means that we see reality through the lens of nationalism, or that reality is constructed by nationalism. This in turn means that everything that is modern—both good and bad—in politics, society, economy, personal relations, literature, science, and so on, is neither the result of an inevitably progressing civilization, nor an expression of an incorrigible human nature. All the ingredients of modernity are here because of nationalism.
  • The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

I - L

[W]e get today the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the misdeeds of their rulers, regardless of whether these had majority support or not. This collective judgment of moral acts is one of the great maladies of the democratic age. ~ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
  • Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.
  • Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.
    • Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, Macmillan, 1961 (p.16). Also quoted in Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies, Wiley, 2009 (p.318).
  • Those who say that we want nationality, they are standing against Islam....We have no use for the nationalists. Moslems are useful for us. Islam is against nationality....
    • Imam Khomeini, [Mehregan Magazine, Volume 12, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Summer 2003, p 16.]
  • These issues that exist among people that we are Iranian and what we need to do for Iran are not correct; these issues are not correct. This issue, which is perhaps being discussed everywhere, regarding paying attention to nation and nationality is nonsense in Islam and is against Islam. One of the things that the designers of Imperialism and their agents have promoted is the idea of nation and nationality.
    • Imam Khomeini, [Mehregan Magazine, Volume 12, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Summer 2003, p 16.]
  • [W]e get today the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the misdeeds of their rulers, regardless of whether these had majority support or not. This collective judgment of moral acts is one of the great maladies of the democratic age.

M - P

Consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that humane capacity can soar to. ~ John Milton
  • A great many people really care very little for their own compatriots, but they hate anything foreign.
  • Consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that humane capacity can soar to.
  • In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.
  • Nationalism was so perfectly suited to its double task, the domestication of workers and the despoliation of aliens, that it appealed to everyone - everyone, that is, who wielded or aspired to wield a portion of capital.

Q - T

To avert national decay, then, the moral character must be guarded. The mighty heart of the nation must be kept sound, so that its pulses, when once roused, will, like the ocean in its strength, sweep all before it. So long as the moral tone is preserved, the sun of our glory will not set; there will come no national decay and death. ~ Frederick William Robertson
I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
  • To avert national decay, then, the moral character must be guarded. The mighty heart of the nation must be kept sound, so that its pulses, when once roused, will, like the ocean in its strength, sweep all before it. So long as the moral tone is preserved, the sun of our glory will not set; there will come no national decay and death.
  • [The newspapers] are talking of nationalism as if it were the property of an individual or as if it were confined to one group only. Nationalism is the property of all. Nobody can take possession of it just as a glittering word which attracts the hearts of stupid people.
    • Abd al-Karim Qasim (1959) The historical extempore speech at the Reserve Officers' College
  • I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike.
  • [W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19. Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component.
  • Individuality is a far more important thing than nationality,and in any given man deserves a thousand-fold more consideration. And since you cannot speak of national character without referring to large numbers of people, it is impossible to be both loud in your praises and honest. National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. If we become disgusted with one, we praise another, until we get disgusted with this one too. Every nation mocks at other nations, and they are all right.
    • Arthur Schopenhauer, ["The Wisdom of Life-IV;Position:Section 2- Pride". (1851).Translated by T. Bailey Saunders. (pg.35 in "The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims", Digireads.com Publishing, 2008)].
  • National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.
  • Nationalism does nothing but teach you how to hate people that you never met. And all of a sudden you take pride in accomplishments you had no part in whatsoever, and you brag about- and the Americans'll go "Fuck the French! Fuck the French, if we hadn't had saved their ass in two World Wars, they'd be speakin' German right now!" And you go, "Oh, was that us?" Was that me and you, Tommy, we saved the French? Jesus! I know I blacked out a little bit after that fourth shot of Jägermeister last night, but I don't remember... I know we went through the Wendy's drive-thru to get one of them "Freschetta" sandwiches that looked so alluring on the commercial, but then we ordered it and realized we had no money, and we had to ditch out before the second window, and those douchebags in line behind us with the bass music probably got our order and we laughed about that. But I don't remember savin' the French. At all! I went through the last ten calls on my cell phone and there's nothin' incoming or outgoing to the French, lookin' for muscle on a project! I checked my pants, there's no mud stains on the knees from where we were garroting Krauts in the trenches at Verdun. I think "we" didn't do anything but watch sports bloopers while we got hammered. I think "we" should shut the fuck up!
  • As conscious beings advance in mental growth, they come to recognise that this ideal must embrace not merely their own kin or neighbours, not only their tribe or nation, not only the whole race or species, but all conscious beings whatever, no matter how foreign.
  • Perhaps the central question in our understanding of nationalism is the role of the past in the creation of the present. … For nationalists themselves, the role of the past is clear and unproblematic. The nation was always there, indeed it is part of the natural order, even when it was submerged in the hearts of its members.
    • Anthony D. Smith (1989, p. 18) As cited in: Öktem, Kerem. "Creating the Turk’s Homeland: Modernization, Nationalism and Geography in Southeast Turkey in the late 19 th and 20 th Centuries." Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Workshop. The City: Urban Culture, Architecture and Society. 2003.
  • The idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that Man has invented. Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry out its systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion,-in fact feeling dangerously resentful if it is pointed out.
    • Rabindranath Tagore. "Nationalism in the West", 1917. Reprinted in Rabindranath Tagore and Mohit K. Ray, Essays (2007, p. 465). Also cited in Parmanand Parashar, Nationalism: Its Theory and Principles in India (1996, p. 212), and Himani Bannerji, Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology. (2011, p.179).
  • The whole track of history is marked with the ruin of empires which having been founded in injustice, or perpetuated by wrong, were ultimately destroyed.
    • William Mackergo Taylor, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 427.
  • What are the phenomena of nationalism? Here are some of them: 1) National egoism, from which many other negative traits of nationalism are derived, as for example — a desire for foreign conquest, a desire to oppress other nations, a desire to impose economic exploitation upon other nations, and so on; 2) national-chauvinism which is also a source of many other negative traits of nationalism, as for example national hatred, the disparagement of other nations, the disparagement of their history, culture, and scientific activities and scientific achievements, and so on, the glorification of developments in their own history that were negative and which from our Marxist point of view are considered negative.
  • It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society. In the United States, religion is therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all the feelings of patriotism; whence it derives a peculiar force.
    • Alexis de Tocqueville, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 427
  • If the great questions of the beginning of this century were mainly political, those which will convulse the world at its close will be social.
    • Alexis de Tocqueville, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 427
  • Patriotism always exists in the greatest degree in rude nations, and in an early period of society.

U - Z

  • So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbours. The citizen of the universe would the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
    • Voltaire, ["Fatherland" in "Miracles and Idolatry" (Selections from the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764),(pg. 56), Penguin Books, 2005.]
  • [N]othing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.
  • Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert those pillars of human happiness, those firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
    • George Washington, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 426.
  • I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply this: mankind inevitably organizes itself into communities according to its geographical distribution; these communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire a local loyalty; the individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these local limits. I do not think that British prosperity must necessarily be inimical to anyone else, but if, on occasions, it is, I want Britain to prosper and not her rivals.
    • Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law:The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939), reprinted in Patrick Deane, History in Our Hands : A Critical Anthology of Writings on Literature, Culture and Politics from the 1930s, Leicester University Press, 1998
  • For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.
    • Rebecca West, "The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal" (1935), reprinted in Patrick Deane, History in Our Hands : A Critical Anthology of Writings on Literature, Culture and Politics from the 1930s, Leicester University Press, 1998.
  • No advanced thought, no mystical philosophy, no glittering abstractions, no swelling phrases about freedom, not even science with its marvelous inventions and discoveries, can help us much in sustaining this republic; still less can godless theories of creation, or any infidel attempt to rule out the Redeemer from His rightful supremacy in our hearts, afford any hope of security. That way lies despair.
    • Robert Charles Winthrop, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 425.
  • As for the point of view of doctrine and Islam, the Muslim umma and its mujahid vanguard do not make alliances and hold animosities on the basis of tribalism and nationalism, nor to help the Arabs against the Persians, or the Kurds against the Arabs, or the Amazighs against the Arabs. Rather, Islam commands us to fight for Allah's word to be supreme. We ally ourselves to the helpers of Islam, even if they be Afghans, Persians, Turks or Kurds, and we are hostile to its enemies who collude with the Crusaders and Jews, even if they are pure-blooded Hashemite, Qurayshite Arabs…I ask my Muslim bothers in general and the callers and the mujahideen and their media organizations in particular to highlight the concept of Islamic brotherhood and disown all partisanship, loyalties, and animosities based on nationalism, and I ask them not to allow the wrongdoing of a faction or entity to motivate to speak evil of that party's entire people or race.

See also

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