Nation and Patriotism

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

A seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon . Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

E pluribus unus .

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

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.

The Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government of the de facto authority of the new state of Israel.

Not until I went into the churches of Americaand heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius andpower. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great.

There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans. . . . Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

The time will therefore come when onehundred and fifty millions of men will be living in North America, equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms.

Don’t spend your time in drilling soldiers, whomay turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.

In my lifetime all the problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions havecome from the English-speaking nations across the world.

We know we can do it—we haven’t lost the ability. That is the Falklands Factor.

[ On the reconquest of South Georgia in the Falklands War :] Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the Marines. Rejoice!

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

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

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.

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

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

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

[The Nobel Peace Prize shall be awarded to] the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

After a third of a century of power flowing from the people and the States to Washington it is time for a New Federalism in which power, funds, and responsibility will flow from Washington to the States and to the people.

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.