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

"People not only stood to respect it but perhaps their thoughts and heartbeats came to standstill, and only inspiration and patriotism was flowing through their veins."

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."

"I'm a universal patriot...my country is the world."

"Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism."

"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."

"If that for which the Spanish Empire has stood since the days of Charles V is right, then everything for which the United States stands and has always stood is wrong."

"In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also."

"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free."

"How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

"Don't give up on yourself, your family and your nation."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality."

"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."

"The Struggle is in your name, Samori - you were named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp."

"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own."

"Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded - that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures - that was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out."

"The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half."

"Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner."

"There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can't, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away."

"On the last day of her visit I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child, and having watched you grow I know that nothing could possibly be more precious to her. She said to me, 'You take care of my daughter.'When she got out of the car my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you and then there was after and in this after you were the god I'd never had. I submitted before your needs and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you."
bottom of page