George Washington Quotes

Patriotism is nationalism, and always leads to war.

The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.

The word patriotism, or its equivalents and derivations, is upon everyone's lips at the present time. It is a magic word which is thought by most people to cover any multitude of sins. To be patriotic in whatever cause is tantamount to being virtuous, while no worse charge can be brought against a man in popular estimation than to say he is unpatriotic.

Patriotism! It is used to define so many diversities, to justify so many wrongs, to compass so many ends, that its life is killed out; it becomes a dead word in the vocabulary-a blank counter, to be moved to any part of the game; and that flag which, streaming from the mast-head of our ship of state, striped with martyr-blood, and glistening with the stars of lofty promise, should always indicate our worldwide mission, and the glorious destinies that we carry forward, is bandied about in every selfish skirmish, and held up as the symbol of every political privateer.

Patriotism covers a multitude of sins.

I cannot tell you how proud watching that [Iraqi] war coverage makes me. I know a lot of people are saying that they think that it's, that you know what we're doing is imperialistic. I watch the way we handle ourselves over there and I've never felt more patriotic in my life.

Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.

What every Englishman thinks about patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

A nation is not worthy to be saved if, in the hour of its fate, it will not gather up all its jewels of manhood and life, and go down into the conflict however bloody and doubtful, resolved on measureless ruin or complete success.

My patriotism and my conscience required me to support it and to engage in the debate over whether and how to fight it.

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.

Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

Men go to war for fear, honor or interest.

We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.

To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the ass.