Nationhood Quotes

We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer. ~ David Cronenberg

Nonetheless, there is one important way that American nationalism does closely resemble German nationalism. Since shortly after the republic's founding, Americans have nurtured a very strong belief that the United States is a special nation, destined not only to take its place among nations but also to be the exemplar of what nationhood should be. ~ Brian E. Fogarty

It is hardly surprising that to this day New England is considered to be the pie capital of America, whose inhabitants traditionally eat (sweet) pie for breakfast. Apple pies in particular became deeply embedded in the history of America - associated with the old country, the new country and the pioneering spirit, and indelibly identified with the sense of nationhood and patriotic sentiment. ~ Janet Clarkson

The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state ... National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide - freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want - in a word: "happiness". ~ Lesslie Newbigin

If you look at it closely, every individual is a separate entity, state and culture. The macro state is a federation of citizens who accept to live under the same law. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. ~ Frantz Fanon

Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It's called the 'Palestinian refugee problem.' This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship.
After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew- ~ Brigitte Gabriel

The Iraqis have become invested in their nationhood. ~ Joe Biden

Many countries in the Middle East are artificial creations. European colonialists drew their national borders in the nineteenth or twentieth century, often with little regard for local history and tradition, and their leaders have had to concoct outlandish myths in order to give citizens a sense of nationhood. Just the opposite is true of Iran. This is one of the world's oldest nations, heir to a tradition that reaches back thousands of years, to periods when great conquerors extended their rule across continents, poets and artists created works of exquisite beauty, and one of the world's most extraordinary religious traditions took root and flowered. ~ Stephen Kinzer

Mr. Schoenbrun, we have a secret weapon ... don't smile when I tell you this. Our secret weapon is nationalism. To have nationhood, which is a sign of maturity, is greater than any weapons in the world. ~ Ho Chi Minh

Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs
which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood. ~ Ralph Ellison

Life should not be a funeral march to the grave. We should have the capacity for being able to lift up not just public dialogue, but lift up each other in a greater cause of nationhood. ~ Dennis Kucinich

Those deterrents - the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors - which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

In spite of the open, laughing face that the Burmese presented to the world, the ingrained, if inarticulate, conviction of their own nationhood prevented them from truly admitting those they saw as 'foreign' into their inner sancturns. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

There has never been nationhood without falsehood. ~ Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood. ~ Miriam Toews

We will no longer be led only by that half of the population whose socialization, through toys, games, values and expectations, sanctions violence as the final assertion of manhood, synonymous with nationhood. ~ Wilma Scott Heide

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

It is in the American interest to put an end to Nationhood. That is the goal in global government. America must get out of the United Nations or our sovereign Republic will not survive. ~ Walt Whitman Rostow

In the past, most wars were motivated by the idea of nationhood. Today, however, wars are incited above all using religion as an excuse. ~ Shimon Peres

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses. ~ Himani Bannerji

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood. ~ Jimmy Carter

Totalizing and dangerous views of "American culture" and "nationhood" can be found in current attempts to portray "Christian values" or particular constructions of "family values" as constitutive of "American culture" and "the American way of life." Views of "American culture" that picture American society as comprised of "free individuals," and of American institutions as already fair and egalitarian, obscure the ways in which various forms of institutional discrimination impede the entry and flourishing of members of marginalized groups. ~ Uma Narayan

The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve. ~ B.W. Powe

What is it that unites, on the left of British politics, George Orwell, Billy Bragg, Gordon Brown and myself? An understanding that identity and a sense of belonging need to be linked to our commitment to nationhood and a modern form of patriotism. ~ David Blunkett

The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well. ~ William Pfaff

For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the best criteria by which to judge our fellow humans. ~ Jeremy Hardy

I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign. ~ Jasmine Ann Cooray

Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century
citizen of the world
will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. ~ Strobe Talbott

The religious doctrine of traditional Judaism entails the acceptance of the nationhood of the Jewish people and the everlasting sanctity of the Land of Israel for them. ~ David Novak

In worshipping their nationhood men worship themselves and scorn others, and that is no healthy thing. ~ C.J. Sansom

The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place. ~ Shlomo Sand

No one has a monopoly on our unending story of nationhood; no one has the manual for our nationhood. ~ John Tamihere