Patriotic Fervor/Quotes
She unfolded another piece of paper. It was a pamphlet. It was headed "From the Mothers of Borogravia!" The mothers of Borogravia were very definite about wanting to send their sons off to war against the Zlobenian Aggressor and used a great many exclamation marks to say so. And this was odd, because the mothers in Munz had not seemed keen on the idea of their sons going off to war, and positively tried to drag them back. Several copies of the pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so. It was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.
—Monstrous Regiment, Discworld
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Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
—Samuel Johnson
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But if patriotic sentiment is wanted, —Nanki-Poo, The Mikado
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Really believing one is about to die is hard. Hospital patients rotted through with cancer, criminals walking to the electric chair or the gallows, sailors on a ship going down in a storm, cling to a secret hope that it is all a mistake, that some relieving word will come to lift the strangling nightmare; so why not Natalie Henry, young and healthy, riding in a train through Eastern Europe. She has her private hope, as no doubt each troubled Jew does all through the cattle cars. She is an American. This sets her off from the others. By crazy circumstances and her own stupid mistakes she is trapped in this train, slowing and groaning up into the mountains on the second night, twisting through timbered valleys and rocky gorges, passing at dead slow through moonlit snowdrifts that spray glittering away from the wheels and whirl off on the wind. Looking out at this pretty scene, freezing and shivering, Natalie things of her Christmas vacation in Colorado when she was a college senior; so the moonlit snow sprayed from the train climbing up the Rockies to Denver. She is grasping American memories. A moment lies ahead when she may live or die by her capacity to look a German official in the face and make him take pause with the words, 'I am an American.' —Natalie Henry headed toward Auschwitz, from War and Remembrance by Hermann Wouk.
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