“It is sad that often, to be a good patriot, one must be the enemy of the rest of mankind.”
Il est triste que souvent, pour être bon patriote, on soit l'ennemi du reste des hommes.
"Country"
Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
Original
Il est triste que souvent, pour être bon patriote, on soit l'ennemi du reste des hommes.
Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
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Voltaire 167
French writer, historian, and philosopher 1694–1778Related quotes
“But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.”
Patriotism, or Peace? http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism,_or_Peace%3F (1896), translated by Nathan Haskell Dole
Variant:
I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked.
What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases, or, finally, some other conception is substituted for patriotism – something which has nothing in common with the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer so severely.
Patriotism and Government http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Government (1900)
Context: Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
Patriotism and Government
“Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.”
Source: The Pursuit of Love
“One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness.”
Quoted in The Unknown Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1994) edited by Bill Adler
The Bonehunters (2006)
“One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.”
15 February 1788
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)
Source: Testament of a Critic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), p. 16
The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
Context: Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished. Reading, writing, thinking and investigating have all been crimes.
Every science has been an outcast.
All the altars and all the thrones united to arrest the forward march of the human race. The king said that mankind must not work for themselves. The priest said that mankind must not think for themselves. One forged chains for the hands, the other for the soul.