Patriotism Critique Quotes

Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your government is doing to you.

… the bankers are for bullets—for the fool patriots that enlist at paupers' wages to stop the bullets, while the bankers clip coupons, boost food prices, increase dividends, and pile up millions and billions for themselves

A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.

The Coup does not support the American flag.

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.

As against the false doctrine of national patriotism, we uphold the ideal of international working class solidarity.

I write as a man in the street. Doubtless I am abnormally dense one because I cannot for the life of me see why this country should be drawn into this war [WWI]. Serbia is not worth the life of one single British Grenadier.

I want young people to be hesitant to glorify war and to demand of their leaders justification for the sacrifices they ask of our citizens.

Are we Uncle Sam or Uncle Sucker?

It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.

It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog.

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.

Young people have been educated and raised to believe that that aspect of our history disqualifies America from ever being anything that you can justify, from ever being anything great, from ever being anything with any goodness in it, that the United States is forever blemished.

To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie, you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good, you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.

No one should let the draft registration figures cause him to believe that the war is becoming popular ... They registered because the law makes it a crime not to register. ... Why should we permit our boys to be killed and maimed by the hundreds of thousands to protect the British commercial interest or because English profiteers make money out of this war?

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 cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Patriotism is understood to be that virtue which consists in serving one's country; but in what way is this 'Patria' or country served by slaying its able bodied men in thousands?

My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative.

If one were loyal to one's nation only because it was good and true ... one would not be loyal to any nation but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or our lives.

To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral.

Go to a nearby military cemetery and look at the American flags stuck on each grave and think of the person buried there who was killed for global domination or for the blunders and egomania of our leadership. And remember, for every person buried there, 10 more loved that person and were shattered by the loss. Instead of saluting, softly say: 'I'm sorry.' ... We need to make Memorial Day a relic of the past.

Patriotism is a sham when it lets out the howl that the people of another nation are a pack of beasts and criminals, unrelated to the human family

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.