National Identity Quotes

“Your pride for your country should not come after your country becomes great; your country becomes great because of your pride in it.”
― Idowu Koyenikan

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”
― Benedict Anderson

“Suatu bangsa tanpa pahlawan sama dengan kulkas tanpa isi, sepeser pun tiada arti”
― Mahbub Djunaidi

“Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest--that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.”
― Neal Shusterman, Downsiders

“National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“E nevoie de un dușman ca să-i dai poporului o speranță. Cineva a spus că patriotismul e ultimul refugiu al canaliilor: cine nu are principii morale se înfășoară de obicei într-un steag, iar bastarzii fac întotdeauna apel la puritatea stirpei lor. Identitatea națională este ultima resursă a dezmoșteniților. Or, simțul identității se întemeiază pe ură, ura împotriva celui ce nu-i identic. Trebuie să cultivi ura ca patos cetățenesc. Dușmanul e prietenul popoarelor. E nevoie oricând de cineva demn de a fi urât ca să te simți justificat în propria-ți mizerie. Ura este adevărata pasiune primordială. Iubirea reprezintă o situație anormală.”
― Umberto Eco, Il cimitero di Praga

“The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have. (Think about it).”
― James Baldwin, Dark Days

“This is our homeland, our life, and since we don't have another one, we will fight for it until the very end and we will never give it up.”
― Viktor Orbán

“They have a nostalgia for a world that never existed. - On Nationalists”
― Lamine Pearlheart

“That's how vile I am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish! I think I hate Ireland more than I hate the theatre, and that's saying something!”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“In previous eras, national identities were forged because humans faced problems and opportunities that were far beyond the scopes of local tribes. Now, we need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science, but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively countering our main problems. To have effective politics, either we must de-globalize the ecology, the economy, and the march of science, or we must globalize our politics.

Since it is impossible to de-globalize the ecology and the march of science, and since the cost of de-globalizing the economy would be prohibitive, the only real solution is to globalize politics. There is no contradiction between such globalism and patriotism, for patriotism isn't about hating foreigners. Patriotism is about taking care of your compatriots, and in the 21st century in order to take good care of your compatriots you must cooperate with foreigners. So good nationalists should now be globalists.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Like fifty million other losers, Anthony was caught up in the game, his misfortune temporarily at bay, his yearning merging with the great national aspiration. From stock traders to kids in Bobigny to Patrick Bruel and José Bové, everyone was on the same page, and it didn't matter whether you were in Paris or Heillange. From the top to the bottom of the pay scale, from the boonies to La Défense, the country was cheering in unison. Basically, the thing was simple. Just do like they do in America: think your country is the best in the world and revel in that forever.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Leurs enfants après eux

“Your connection with any ethnic group should be determined by social factors, such as your attitude to the widespread patterns of behavior and style of thinking in this group. If you feel strange in this social environment, it means that you cannot belong to it. Therefore, national identity should be a rational choice made by you in your adult life and cannot be automatically identified at birth.”
― Elmar Hussein

“They want to dissolve Europe. They want to take away our own life and change it to something which is not our life.”
― Viktor Orbán

“The border of a nationality does not exist ‘in-itself’ in the same way that, say, a mountain, a shell or the moon exists. The border of a nationality is a condition that exists, if it can be said to exist at all, in the mind of the one who passively accepts it as existing. It is a ready-cut cloth, a costume, a fabricated flag, which is used to cover our nothingness.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Pakistan’s young median age today means that an overwhelming majority of its current inhabitants were born in a country called Pakistan and, therefore, do not need an explanation other than their birth to be its citizens.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Jak mam coś do napisania, to staram się pisać jak najmądrzej i żeby to było jak najlepsze. A to, czy ja jestem Polak podczas pisania, czy jestem Chińczyk, to do mnie nie należy. Ja jestem człowiek i moją robotę muszę zrobić jak najlepiej.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Publicystyka. Wywiady. Teksty różne 1963-1969

“National identity is, of course, historically constructed; but it is nevertheless symbolized by a flag and an anthem, materialized by administrative acts and by material boundaries, the object of emotional projections that make people speak, make them act and even, sometimes, fight.”
― Nathalie Heinich, Wat onze identiteit niet is

“A word spoken in Polish has quite a different effect than when spoken in that "foreign" tongue, German.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

“Most national identities rest in part on a series of shared pseudohistorical myths.”
― Christopher Tyerman, God's War: A New History of the Crusades

“Without question, Americans live in the freest, most prosperous, and welcoming nation that mankind has ever created. Despite this, America is being systematically taught to hate itself. The effort is coordinated, pervasive, and fundamentally corrosive to the core of our national identity. If you readily dismiss this as some nut-job conspiracy theory, you have been fooled and are well on your way to being a victim of gaslighting.”
― Daniel Shyti, American Gaslighting: How America is Being Systematically Taught to Hate Itself

“I said Burns was a great Scottish poet who loved before Scott, and Shakespeare and Dickens et cetera were all English, but he could not grasp the difference between Scotland and England.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Years of officially promoted European idealism and denigration of national sentiment added to a growing sense of unease. What was it, in a world of multinational business and pan-European bureaucracy, to be Dutch, or French, or German?”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“During moments of national importance, it feels as though bills will be paid and mortgages covered, dreams no longer deferred. It feels as though, maybe, it can be less about money than about honor.”
― Maura Cheeks, Acts of Forgiveness

“Many resented how some expressions of Englishness were allowed, while others were not. It was acceptable to love the English countryside, English humour, English music and English Literature, and to see these aspects of Englishness as welcoming, humane, full of energy and creativity. But the moment Englishness took a political form it became anathema. Even mild forms of patriotism were frowned upon. The English flag was acceptable fluttering from a church tower in a picturesque village, but was instantly interpreted as a form of racism if hanging from someone's window on an estate.”
― Caroline Lucas, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story

“What makes those with perceived 'English' identities different from others in the UK? One answer is that, unlike Wales, Northern ireland and Scotland, with their devolved legislatures, separate languages and tangible and distinct culture, England's identity as distinct from the rest of the UK is less secure.”
― Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging

“To riot for equality or to riot for historic national identity, that is the question.”
― Steven Magee

“By 1938, Scotland had for nearly 200 years lived within a classic peripheral identity assigned to it by the artists and ideologues of the great European core cultures through the mode of Romanticism and their control of the means of (ideological) production. However, the brute fact of subsequent uneven economic development compelled the Scots to bring into collision with that historically assigned identity a new-fashioned identity more appropriate to a dynamic modern nation. Great national moments of self-presentation, such as the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938, were the occasions when the ongoing dialectic of modern/urban against rural/ancient emerged in its most public and delirious form. Such occasions therefore hold a political lesson. The process of speaking with two voices - the fissures; the uncertainties; the grating shifts of gear from one discourse to another - assert once more, the fluid, unstable character of national identity. Such occasions proclaim that national identity is not a set of inborn, natural characteristic in a people, but the product of that people's history. With the realisation of instability comes the realisation of the possibility of change.”
― Colin McArthur, Popular Culture and Social Relations

“آه ای سرزمین سیه روزی
که باید پیوسته سینه ی تو را کاوید
ای شهر من! ای شهر من!
بلاخره روزی در زندگی ما
بهار می شکفد
ای وطن من، بلاخره آزادی
من می گویم؛ تو از آن منی”
― Jean Laffitte, ب‍رم‍ی‌گ‍ردی‍م‌ گ‍ل‌ ن‍س‍ری‍ن‌ ب‍چ‍ی‍ن‍ی‍م‌

“In times of crisis, presidential scholar Grant McConnell has written, the nation, which seemed only an abstraction the day before, suddenly becomes a vivid reality. A mysterious process unfolds as the president and the flag become rallying points for all Americans. At such moments, if the president is able to meet the challenge, he is able to give shape, to organize, to create and recreate the nation.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II