Nationalism Quotes

Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.

Religion is a 16th-century word for nationalism.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Nationalism, of course, is intrinsically absurd. Why should the accident – fortune or misfortune – of birth as an American, Albanian, Scot or Fiji Islander impose loyalties that dominate an individual life and structure a society so as to place it in formal conflict with others? In the past there were local loyalties to place […]

These two (nationalism and Christianity), when taken seriously, are incompatible… For my part I hold that, where they differ, Christianity is preferable, but where they agree, both are mistaken.

Breathes there a man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d As home his footsteps he hath turn’d From wandering on a foreign strand!

No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified in the name of patriotism.

There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one’s country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization.

Nationality is respectable only when it is on the defense, when it is waging wars of liberation it is sacred; when those of domination it is accursed.

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.