William Hazlitt Quotes

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and "patriotism" . . . Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own.

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism--the idolatry of the 20th century.

I think Americans are always going to care more about Americans than about Mexicans.

Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.

The English, the English, The English are best: So Up with the English and Down with the Rest!

I don't really have anything against the French except that, as an American, I've been bred to despise them with the same zeal as soccer and Renny Harlin films.

Or a White Englishman would rather smash a White Frenchman than a Jew! Crazy!

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.

National pride may be a valuable possession, but when it becomes consciousness of racial superiority it ceases to be an Imperial virtue.

Away with national pride that only raises national hatred

American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.

I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.'

In England, we're arrogant to everything else.

All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

I dislike loud-mouthed patriots who suggest they like our country more than I do. Some people's idea of patriotism is hating other countries.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

We white people think that we know everything.