George Carlin Quotes

It’s a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It’s incomprehensible to someone who comes from a country where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared, where any nostalgia and concern for it is a sign of an attachment to the past…

I despise any flag, not just the American flag. It's a symbol of a piece of land that's considered more important than the human lives on it.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

I'm not really clear what the whole deal is with flags. I like my flag, but I wouldn't die for it. There's issues of identity, of course. That's going to always come in. I, for example, don't want to be called a 'North Britisher.' I want to be Scottish.

Our politics is about people not flags.

Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith.

I wish black people had a flag they could put into the ground, like when the troops stormed Iwo Jima.

I love this country, but the union jack leaves me cold.

This self-congratulatory notion Americans have that their country is Number One is borne of ignorance and bad manners.

The game is just, everybody talks about baseball, but I really think football probably has a little bit more American feeling than anything.

We all know by now that Barack Obama is not a patriot. After all, he doesn't always wear a flag pin, and he objects to the idea that he should be required to in order to run for office.

We commit our lives to serving intangibles, swearing oaths to a piece of parchment or saluting an expanse of cloth decorated with stars and stripes. We understand symbolism because symbolism is what in large measure compiles us to do a job that might result in our demise.

He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.

A flag should unite those over whom it flies.

We can imagine no more appropriate response to burning a flag than to waving one's own, no better way to counter a flag-burner's message than by saluting the flag that burns, no surer means of preserving the dignity even of the flag that burned than by, as one witness here did, according its remains a respectful burial.

Respect for the flag transcends political party.

This flag does not belong to the right wing of the Republican party. It belongs to all of us.

With a flag you can lead people wherever you want.

It is an unmistakable statement of contempt for a government to burn its flag.

The old flag. The old policy. The old leader.

I flung forward the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and defend it.

Don’t get too wrapped up in the flag because every flag is superseded by the cross.

Where new states have come into being, they have invariably swaddled themselves in sacred symbols and shibboleths forged in more dedicated struggles, beginning with an often random tricolor and a national anthem.

A moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole, It does not look likely to stir a man's soul. 'Tis the deeds that were done 'neath the moth-eaten rag, When the pole was a staff, and the rag was a flag.

Burning the American flag should be punishable by loss of citizenship.