Nationality Quotes

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“Your pride for your country should not come after your country becomes great; your country becomes great because of your pride in it.”
― Idowu Koyenikan

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master & Commander

“But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.”
― Pádraig Pearse

“India is not a nation, nor a country. It is a subcontinent of nationalities.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.”
― Sharon Maas, Of Marriageable Age

“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, and nationality. We are all equals with a common pulse to survive. Every human requires food and water. Every human has a dream and desire to be happy. Every human responds to love, suffering and pain. Every human bleeds the same color and occupies the same world. Let us recognize that we are all part of each other. We are all human. We are all one.”
― Suzy Kassem

“We need to eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, religion, and nationality. Every human requires food and water to survive and every human has a heart that bleeds, loves, and grieves.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

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"Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“To become truly human,one has to try an release oneself from the shackles of race,religion and nationality.The quantum of humanism one acquires is inevitably filtered when one limits oneself."-Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad(Kant Lecture,20090)”
― Ashoka Prasad

“Those without heritage, history, and place are subject to exploitation, manipulation, and deception.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Sich mit diesem oder jenem zu identifizieren, ist also ein normaler Vorgang. Gefährlich wird es, sobald eine einzige Identität bestimmend wird, sobald man nur noch Muslim ist oder Christ oder Deutscher, Iraner oder meinetwegen Anhänger eines bestimmten Fußballclubs oder eines Popstars. Dann wird aus der pragmatischen Einschränkung, die jede Art von Identifizierung bedeutet, eine reale Verstümmelung der Persönlichkeit.”
― Navid Kermani

“He used to be a German, but he completely recovered.”
― Boris Akunin, Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

“England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men… who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“But,” began the Zainichi North Korean man, “even if we know all that stuff, isn’t it pointless if the people discriminating against you don’t?”

“What matters is that we know,” I said. “Those ignorant haters who discriminate based on nationality and ethnicity are pathetic. We need to educate ourselves and make ourselves stronger and forgive them. Not that I’m anywhere near that yet.”
― Kazuki Kaneshiro, Go

“Anders als die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika haben sich die meisten europäischen Nationalstaaten auf der Grundlage von Homogenisierungen entwickelt; historisch liegt ihnen das Ideal einer Einheit von Blut, Kultur, Sprache und Religion zugrunde. Dieser Drang zur Vereinheitlichung war kaum irgendwo stärker als in Deutschland, eben weil es sich erst spät zu einer Nation herausgebildet hat, und das Deutsche niemals ein so natürlicher oder unumstrittener Bezugspunkt war wie England für die Engländer oder Frankreich für die Franzosen.”
― Navid Kermani

“He was a Russian with a Serbian name who had spent half his life in the United States, and he belonged to none of those places, not much more than human driftwood at that point.”
― James Irwin, Nina's Friends

“Nationality is a right, nationalism is not. Religion is a right, fundamentalism is not.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“He went there in the mornings, sometimes, and gave himself to that strange country rapture, that deep, bone-warming feeling that England was his, and he was England's. He felt it as strongly as if his ancestors had been there a thousand years. Perhaps he felt it more strongly because they hadn't.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Nationality is partly a matter of convenience.”
― Zaina Arafat

“This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.