top of page
.png){kind=small}
"As the wine went down in the bottles, patriotism arose in the three men. And when the wine was gone they went down the hill arm in arm for comradeship and safety, and they walked into Monterey. In front of an enlistment station they cheered loudly for America and dared Germany to do her worst. They howled menaces at the German Empire until the enlistment sergeant awakened and put on his uniform and came into the street to silence them. He remained to enlist them."
Standard
Customized
More
"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Thomas Jefferson asked himself "In what country on earth would you rather live He first answered "Certainly in my own where are all my friends my relations and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. But he continued "which would be your second choice His answer "France."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Large countries' patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic - especially toward the Fourth of July."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Across the country military families are facing dire financial circumstances due to longer than expected tours of duties. They are being penalized for their patriotism - no one should have to choose between doing right by their country and doing right by their families."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
Time
"I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it."
Work
"No one wants advice - only corroboration."
Advice
"A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave."
Identity
"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it."
Heritage
"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true."
Life
"Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels."
Greed
"There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty."
Truth
"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
Creativity
"If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."
Storytelling
bottom of page