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Patriotism and Nationalism Quotes and Quotations
 Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.  I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country. 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. Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedicaton of a lifetime. True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. A nation is a body of people who have done great things together. Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. The French have a passion for revolution but an abhorrence of change. God made the ocean, but the Dutch made Holland. The Creator made Italy with designs by Michelangelo. Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests. What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones. There is Ontario patriotism, Quebec patriotism, or Western patriotism; each based on the hope that it may swallow up the others, but there is no Canadian patriotism, and we can have no Canadian nation when we have no Canadian patriotism. I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish. The mind supplies the idea of a nation, but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams. My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce, who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Paris. A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and hope to do great things together in the future. The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business. Ireland is a fatal disease; fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen. 
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