4th of July

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For my brothers and sisters who on this day may want to wave flags, these thoughts to ponder:





It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.

Baha'u'llah

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Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.

James Bryce (British politician, diplomat, and historian, 1838-1922)

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To him in whom love dwells, the whole world is but one family.

Buddha

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The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation.

Jimmy Carter (39th U.S. President (1977-81). Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. b.1924)

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The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

Pablo Casals (Spanish Cellist and Conductor, 1876-1973)

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It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

Arthur C. Clarke

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True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Clarence Darrow

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You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can be free only if I am free.

Clarence Darrow (U.S. Lawyer, Speaker and Writer, 1857-1938)

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I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.

Eugene V. Debs

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We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

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Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!

Albert Einstein

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He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

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Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.

William Lloyd Garrison (Declaration of Sentiments, Boston Peace Conference, 1838)

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I love America. I love the world. Brotherhood and sisterhood have no borders. My heart orbits the Earth, love cannot be measured in longitude or latitude.

Terri Guillemets

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Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

Abraham Lincoln

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We are free, truly free, when we don't need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.

Ricardo Flores Magón, speech, 31 May 1914

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Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.

Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959

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Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

Guy de Maupassant (French writer of short stories and novels, 1850-1893)

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We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us . . . The old "manifest destiny" idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can — and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations.

Francis John McConnell

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If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident.

Montesquieu

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Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?

Blaise Pascal

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If you can't get them to salute when they should salute and wear the clothes you tell them to wear, how are you going to get them to die for their country?

General George S. Patton (U.S. general in World War I and II, 1885-1945)

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If patriotism is "the last refuge of a scoundrel," it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether.

Ralph B. Perry

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I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.

Ronald Reagan, 1985 [Stupid indeed, and blind, if we cannot see our common humanity without a threat from another planet; what greater threat to humanity, and the Earth, than ourselves? R.J.G.]

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Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.

Bertrand Russell (English logician and philosopher 1872-1970)

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Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Bertrand Russell

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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

George Santayana

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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

George Bernard Shaw

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Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw

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I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.

Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)
also credited to Diogenes of Sinope (412 BC - 323 BC)

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I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.

Rosika Schwimmer

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The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (Russian thinker, novelist and philosopher, 1828-1910)

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The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

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The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

Earl Warren

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As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America [U.S.] among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

George Washington (1st US President (1789-97), 1732-1799)

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You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.

Malcolm X (U.S. black militant leader the early 1960s, 1925-1965)

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