“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.”
The End of an Age: and other essays (1948), p. 127
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William Ralph Inge 18
Dean of St Pauls 1860–1954Related quotes

Observing the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7 1991 http://www.navy.mil/navco/pages/2001/01pg-017-ph-bush120791.htm

“Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”
Alternate translation: Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.
Also quoted in Psychologically Speaking: A Book of Quotations, Kevin Connolly and Margaret Martlew, 1999, p. 96
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.”
Prologue
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)
Context: It is the general idea put forward by Proudhon in 1840 that unites him with the later anarchists, with Bakunin and Kropotkin, and also with certain earlier and later thinkers, such as Godwin, Stirner, and Tolstoy, who evolved anti-governmental systems without accepting the name of anarchy; and it is in this sense that I shall treat anarchism, despite its many variations: as a system of social thought, aiming at fundamental changes in the structure of society and particularly — for this is the common element uniting all its forms — at the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of non-governmental cooperation between free individuals.

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

Source: Recollections on the French Revolution

President Maduro's speech at the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts), 26 September 2018

interview with Democracy Now! (November 14, 2012). Glenn Greenwald: While Petraeus Had Affair with Biographer, Corporate Media Had Affair with Petraeus. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/14/glenn_greenwald_while_petraeus_had_affair Retrieved on 2012-11-15.

Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)
Context: Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing the one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing needful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest spiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian religion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence.