#nationalism

Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two! ↗

— David Sedaris

#nationalism #humor

But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort. ↗

— Amos Oz

#any #anywhere #everyday #everyday people #fanaticism

The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#duty #nationalism #life

George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'. ↗

— Gideon Haigh

#orwell #sport #war #death

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

#nationalism #imagination

The challenge to which these two groups responded was the interdependence of human kind, North and South, Rich and Pool, Industrialised and Rural, in the aftermath of the Second World War. To the United World College group it called for the establishment of a new kind of school where young people of all nations and backgrounds could live and learn together at the most formative period of their adolescence and so form those ties of friendship and understanding that would last them through their lives ↗

— Prince Charles HRH the Prince of Wales

#internationalism #united-world-colleges #uwc #youth #friendship

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

#racism #pride

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#nationalism

Don't look back!" "Why not?" "Because I just did! Run faster! ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#nationalism

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt. ↗

— John Adams

#fiscal-policy #national-debt #nationalism