Nation and Patriotism

Such is the patriot’s boast, where’er we roam,

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom...Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make abody of more or less connected legend, rangingfrom the large and cosmogonic, to the level ofromantic fairy-story—the larger founded onthe lesser in contact with the earth, the lesserdrawing splendor from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; tomy country.

 

Hating England is a form of self-defense. That kind of nationalism is nothing more than a local manifestation of a concern for human rights.

And that will be England gone,

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches, But where there’s so much as half a conversation The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.

 

Moscow: those syllables can start

 

Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph.

Treacherous generals: look at my dead house, look at broken Spain.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

From this amphibious ill-born mob began

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

So geographers, in Afric-maps,

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage.

Outside the Kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than another. God and history will remember your judgment!

 

But from each hollow of Spain Spain comes forth.

Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.