#patriot

The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act. ↗

— Lawrence Halprin

#compatriots #creative #creative act #felt #i

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. ↗

— Mark Twain

#about #holler #hollering #knowing #loudest

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#from time to time #liberty #must #patriots #refreshed

One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#nazi #patriotism #pride #virtue #war

I certainly didn't concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stress-tested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British that one didn't make a big thing out of patriotic allegiance, and was indeed brimful of sarcastic and critical remarks about the old country, but would pull oneself together and say a word or two if it was attacked or criticized in any nasty or stupid manner by anybody else. It's family, in other words, and friends are family to me. I feel rather the same way about being an American, and also about being of partly Jewish descent. To be any one of these things is to be no better than anyone else, but no worse. When confronted by certain enemies, it is increasingly the 'most definitely no worse' half of this unspoken agreement on which I tend to lay the emphasis. (As with Camus’s famous 'neither victim nor executioner,' one hastens to assent but more and more to say 'definitely not victim.') ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#britain #britishness #camus #edward-said #family

Only with the honour thus acquired can we earn the respect of our other compatriots as well. ↗

— Janos Kadar

#compatriots #earn #honour #only #other

There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#always #between #difference #experience #foreign

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child? ↗

— Lin Yutang

#food #patriotism #food

Patriotism was a living fire of unquestioned belief and purpose. ↗

— Frank Knox

#belief #fire #living #patriotism #purpose

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#cruel #founded #greater #more #power