Quotes on Patriotism

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

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

I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

Our purpose now is to reclaim democracy itself. We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism.

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.

Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS.

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace! – but there is no peace.

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life - one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.

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.

Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult.

I know not what others may choose but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.