Nationalism

Bertold Brecht - Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat. English: Pity the country that needs heroes.

Karl Deutsch - A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.

Sigmund Freud (in Civilization and its discontents) - It is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other. ("Narcissism of small differences")

Daniel Fried - Nationalism is like cheap alcohol – first it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.

Ernst Gellner (1983) - Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.

Ernst Gellner - Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond. (...) Culture and social organisation are universal and perennial. States and nationalisms are not. This is an absolutely central and supremely important fact.

Ernst Gellner - Traditional society had taught that man was made by his status. The Enlightenment (perhaps secularising the religious view that man was made by his relation to a single deity) taught that man was made by his reason. Romanticism taught that he was made by his roots.

Joseph Heath - The only mechanism that we have to solve big problems (...) is the nation-state, but one of the major devices that states use to motivate their citizens to cooperate is rivalry with other nations. This makes genuine global cooperation very difficult to achieve.

Eric Hobsbawm - Nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions.

Dhruva Jaishankar - Just as history is often written by the winners, it is rarely forgotten by the losers.

Adam Michnik - Back in 1990, I wrote that nationalism is the last stage of communism: a system of thought that gives simple but wrong answers to complex questions. Nationalism is practically the natural ideology of authoritarian regimes.

Ernest Renan (in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, 1882) - Oblivion and, I would venture, a misreading of history, are essential ingredients for the birth of a new nation. French original: L'oubli et, je dirais même, l'erreur historique sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation.

Ernest Renan (in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, 1882) - A nation is a great solidarity created by the sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and those which one is disposed to make in the future. French original: Une nation est donc une grande solidarité, constituée par le sentiment des sacrifices qu'on a faits et de ceux qu'on est disposé à faire encore.

George Bernard Shaw - Patriotism is your conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

Arthur Schopenhauer (in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit) - Every nation makes fun of the other ones, and all are right. French: Chaque nation se moque de l'autre, et toutes ont raison. German original: Jede Nation spottet über die andere, und alle haben recht.

Joshua Searle-White - Even when groups are created artificially and based on minimal real differences, such as in laboratory research, people still tend to favor their ingroup.

Joshua Searle-White - Categories help us to understand the world. But they also tend to make the content within them seem more homogenous.

Charles Tilly - War makes the state and the state makes war.

Traditional - Schrödinger's immigrant: the one who lazes around on benefits whilst simultaneously stealing your job.

Turkish proverb - The only friend of a Turk is a Turk.