"In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it."
— Barack Obama

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril. "
— Winston S. Churchill

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it."
— Mark Twain

"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

"My old man says when it's time to be counted, the important thing is to be man enough to stand up."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Between Planets)

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm patriotic enough. Yes, I want to kill people, but on both sides."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"Displayed in the Lobby of the Shreveport, LA Veterans Hospital

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve.
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do great things.
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy.
I was given poverty, that I might become wise.

I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men.
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need for God.

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life.
I was given Life, that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers and true needs were fulfilled.

I am, among all men, most richly blessed.
"
— Unknown Civil War Veteran

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
— Albert Einstein

"No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots."
— Barbara Ehrenreich

"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

"It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen."
— Aristotle (Etica Nicomaquea & Politica)

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country."
— Bertrand Russell

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

""Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit."
"
— Emma Goldman

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams"
— David McCullough (John Adams)

"The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty To God and my country"
— Boy Scouts of America

"Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers)

"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.

They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
— Henry A. Wallace

"Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same."
— George Orwell

"There are two kinds of patriotism -- monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."
— Mark Twain

"The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it."
— George Bernard Shaw

"To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?"
— Mark Twain

"It's your attitude not your aptitude that creates your altitude"
— Nithyajeejo

"To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism."
— G. Edward Griffin

""The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country"
"
— George S. Patton Jr.

"I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."
— Carl Schurz (Speeches, Correspondence And Political Papers Of Carl Schurz V5: January 30, 1889-December 27, 1898)

"Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts."
— Ian Fleming (Casino Royale)

"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not its institutions or its officeholders."
— Mark Twain

"My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor."
— Herbert Hoover

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
— Thomas Jefferson

"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

"I care dearly for this country [USA]. I do love this country. I spend enough time overseas to realize that as bad as it is it's still probably about the best thing going. What kills me though is when I know it can be better."
— Blackie Lawless

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

""...It is a proud privilege to be a soldier – a good soldier … [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.""
— George S. Patton Jr.

"It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.

By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person."
— Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel)

"There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings"
— Alfred De Musset (Lorenzaccio)

"Mankind were intended to be happy... that government being only the means of securing freedom and happiness to the people, whenever it deviates from this end, and their freedom and happiness are in great danger of being irrevocably lost, the government is no longer entitled to their allegiance. ("The Principles of an American Whig"-1777)"
— Jamie Iredell

"So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other."
— Barack Obama

"How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense in giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?"
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"Anders als die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika haben sich die meisten europäischen Nationalstaaten auf der Grundlage von Homogenisierungen entwickelt; historisch liegt ihnen das Ideal einer Einheit von Blut, Kultur, Sprache und Religion zugrunde. Dieser Drang zur Vereinheitlichung war kaum irgendwo stärker als in Deutschland, eben weil es sich erst spät zu einer Nation herausgebildet hat, und das Deutsche niemals ein so natürlicher oder unumstrittener Bezugspunkt war wie England für die Engländer oder Frankreich für die Franzosen."
— Navid Kermani

"What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported."
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)

"At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers in his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime. "
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

""They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king."
"
— Bob Dylan