"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

"All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born."
— Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon

"But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile."
— Patrick O'Brian

"Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on Earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on Earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are, "We're number two.""
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

""We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.""
— Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)

"Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
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— Theodore Roosevelt

"No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more aristocrats, no more armaments, no more police, no more countries, enough of these imbecilities, no more, no more, no more, no more, no more"
— Louis Aragon (Aragon, de dada au surrealisme, papiers inedits 1917-1931)

" I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings."
— Benedict Anderson

"The revolution in global communications thus forces all nations to reconsider traditional ways of thinking about national sovereignty."
— George Shultz

"[Der Zoll] ist ein Gesellschaftsspiel und eine Religion, die Religion der Vaterländer."
— Kurt Tucholsky (Rheinsberg. Schloss Gripsholm.)

"There has never been nationhood without falsehood."
— Felipe Fernández-Armesto

"Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us."
— Robert Byron (The Road to Oxiana)

"If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion."
— Henri Frederic Amiel

"Al escribir "historia" me refiero a la general o universal. No hay otra: lo que se llama "historia patria" es espejo del hombre -y entonces es también universal- o es una anécdota de sobremesa."
— Octavio Paz

"Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded.


from, In the Country of Men

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— Hisham Matar