Patriotism Quotes and Sayings

Patriotism Quotes

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives.  I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The love of one's country is a splendid thing.  But why should love stop at the border?  ~Pablo Casals

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance.  It is also owed to justice and to humanity.  Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.  ~James Bryce

It is sweet to serve one's country by deeds, and it is not absurd to serve her by words.  ~Sallust

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!  ~Albert Einstein

Our hearts where they rocked our cradle,

Our love where we spent our toil,

And our faith, and our hope, and our honor,

We pledge to our native soil.

God gave all men all earth to love,

But since our hearts are small,

Ordained for each one spot should prove

Beloved over all.

~Rudyard Kipling

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.  ~George Santayana

It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism.  ~J. Horace McFarland

[P]atriotism... is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.  ~Adlai Stevenson

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.  ~William Shenstone

If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag.  ~Author Unknown

Love your country.  Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascend to him.  ~Giuseppe Mazzini

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.  ~Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889

He loves his country best who strives to make it best.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.  ~Bertrand Russell

Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.  ~Seneca

Do not... regard the critics as questionable patriots.  What were Washington and Jefferson and Adams but profound critics of the colonial status quo?  ~Adlai Stevenson

Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.  ~S.I. Hayakawa

A private man, however successful in his own dealing, if his country perish is involved in her destruction; but if he be an unprosperous citizen of a prosperous city, he is much more likely to recover.  Seeing, then, that States can bear the misfortunes of individuals, but individuals cannot bear the misfortunes of States, let us all stand by our country.  ~Thucydides

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.  ~George Jean Nathan

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.  ~Mark Twain

 

   

 

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.  ~George Bernard Shaw

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.  ~William R. Inge

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.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Nationalism is an infantile disease.  It is the measles of mankind.  ~Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1934

To him in whom love dwells, the whole world is but one family.  ~Buddha

I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.  ~Rosika Schwimmer

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.  ~George Bernard Shaw

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.  ~Arthur C. Clarke

Patriotism is easy to understand in America - it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.  ~Calvin Coolidge

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?  ~Lin Yutang

Patriotism knows neither latitude nor longitude.  It is not climatic.  ~E.A. Storrs

A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.  ~George William Curtis

If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident.  ~Montesquieu

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.  ~Socrates

The stench of the trail of Ego in our History.  It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.  ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career

I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet.  [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.  ~Ronald Reagan, 1985

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men

By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,

And when the borders bleed we watch with dread

The lines of ink across the map turn red.

~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.  ~Earl Warren

Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.  ~Richard Aldington

We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us..... The old "manifest destiny" idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can - and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations.  ~Francis John McConnell

Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious.  ~Oscar Wilde

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.  ~Eugene V. Debs

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind.  We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands.  The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race.  Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.  ~William Lloyd Garrison, Declaration of Sentiments, Boston Peace Conference, 1838

If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.  ~Hamilton Fish

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.  ~Guy de Maupassant

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.  ~Charles de Gaulle

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?  ~Blaise Pascal, quoted by Tolstoy in Bethink Yourselves

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.  ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world.  The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.  ~Baha'u'llah