Patriotism Quotes

Samia Suluhu Hassan, George Washington, George Orwell, Albert Einstein and Daniel Webster lead the list. The sourced lines are mostly sceptical. Oscar Wilde, in 1894, calls patriotism the vice of nations. Russell, in Has Man a Future? (1962), notes that patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for it. Mark Twain’s notebook, published in 1935, has a passage on the patriot being a scarce, brave, hated and scorned man at the start of a change, whose place the timid join once his cause succeeds.

Three entries are flagged misattributed. A line on preserving the life of citizens, credited to Seneca, comes from the Roman tragedy Octavia, which modern scholarship generally does not give to him. A passage about killing the national pride of one generation is credited to Lavrentiy Beria. A line separating patriotism from nationalism is credited to Samuel Johnson.