top of page
"The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism A la carte."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Patriotism quotes

"Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light."

"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."

"Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith."

"He who is ready to die for his country is a fool. For he didn't choose where he was born, and where he was born didn't choose him."

"I would entertain the apparently fading idea that patriotism that serves the self is greed dressed in the garments of liberty and adorned with the fashion accessories of other associated patriotic notions."

"America is a willingness of the heart."

"Tens of thousands of brave Americans died to break the chains of British tyranny so that the principles of our Declaration of Independence could take fold and flourish in the birth of a new nation."

"Lincoln did more than any other man to put the stamp of righteousness, to put the stamp of compassion, on the name of America."

"I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all."

"The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter."

"Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much."

"I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."

"Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time."

"Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church."

"You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact."

"I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both."

"I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us-Christians, Muslims, atheists-lived in this fear of this truth."
bottom of page