Quotes on Patriotic

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.

I have been struck by the pervasive frequency of pompously patriotic ads for the defense industry, usually accompanied by deferential salutations to our men and women who are heroically sacrificing their lives in our defense. Do we really need all of that for our security?

Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first.

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

I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, so I ask you to confirm me with your prayers.

None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.