Bernard-Henri Levy Quotes

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.

A flag should unite those over whom it flies.

Show me the race or nation without a flag, and I will show you a people without any pride.

I like traditions, and the national anthem is important.

And my father, after all, was a nationalist.

I prefer people to see me as an Ivorian and as a patriot.

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.

It's your flag and my flag.

I have loved but one flag and cannot share that affection with the mongrel banner designed for the League [of Nations.]

The motherland is the common mother, the unity within which isolated the individuals penetrate and become enmeshed. It is the holy name that expresses the voluntary fusion of all interests into one interest, of all lives into one lasting and perpetual life.

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.

There's something I will say: In the U.S., people are very patriotic. Their patriotism is obvious. In France, for many years, you had to fight to be patriotic. People are pushing us from loving our own country.

Standing up for national anthem doesn't make you an Indian. Posting flags on social networks doesn't make you an Indian.

There are times this stony heart of mine feels a burst of British pride.

If you play in this country, live in this country, and you grow up in the heartland - and you put on a Russian uniform - you are not a patriotic person.

It is a poor observance of our first century as a nation if we run up a flag of surrender with three dying maple leaves on it.

A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

Never was patriot yet, but was a fool.

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

Our flag is not just one of many political points of view. Rather, the flag is a symbol of our national unity.

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

When I see the American flag, I go, 'Oh my God, you're insulting me.'