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Patriots' Quotes

Senator Carl Schurz, 1872

My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

President Dwight Eisenhower, speech, 1956

We are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won.

President Harry S. Truman

Our goal must be—not peace in our time—but peace for all time.

Eugene V. Debs, Speech, 1914

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.

George S. McGovern and William R. Polk, "The Way Out of War", Harper's, October 2006

When a driver is on the wrong road and headed for an abyss, it is a bad idea to "stay the course."

Joe Ellis, prominent Quaker

The true nature of security is having no enemies. So, we turn our enemies into friends.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970

Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood.

Octavia Butler, from her novel Fledgling

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Clarence S. Darrow

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Elie Wiesel, May, 2004

Peace is not God's gift to his creatures, but it is our gift to each other.

President Thomas Jefferson

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

President James Madison

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Pastor Martin Niemoeller, Nazi Germany

First they came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, but by that time, no one was left to speak up.

President Jimmy Carter, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize

War is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

President Richard M. Nixon, Proclamation to Strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, 1972

When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and—eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies.

Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, February 1, 2004

Upon his return from a recent visit to Iraq:

The people of Iraq are clearly the victims as their country continues to deteriorate. Among the many people we spoke with, there was agreement that, as some had described it, at this point the Americans are doing what Saddam did—the best for themselves, not for the people. Whatever our real motive for invading Iraq this is how the people now perceive our presence.

Benjamin Franklin

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

Elie Wiesel

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

President George W. Bush, 2001

The August 14, 2003 issue of USA Today reported that shortly after his inauguration, George W. Bush joked to a crowd of Washington insiders:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.

President James Madison

Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops germs of every other.

Thomas Paine

My country is the world. My religion is to do good.

Herman Goering, 1946

It's customary for us to showcase a quote from a patriot here. This time, however, the quote is from Herman Goering, a German Luftwaffe commander during his trial in Nuremberg for war crimes during World War II.

Why of course the people don't want war: Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked [and] denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Julia Ward Howe, Mother's Day Proclamation, 1870

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

Our Government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency Always, there has been some terrible evil or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded.

Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

President Dwight Eisenhower, 16^th April 1953

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.

President Theodore Roosevelt, 7^th May 1918

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., February 25, 1967

The stages of history are replete with the chants and choruses of the conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace. Alexander, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon were akin in seeking a peaceful world order, a world fashioned after their selfish conceptions of an ideal existence. Each sought a world at peace which would personify his egotistic dreams.

Even within the life span of most of us, another megalomaniac strode across the world stage. He sent his blitzkrieg-bent legions blazing across Europe, bringing havoc and holocaust in his wake. There is grave irony in the fact that Hitler could come forth, following nakedly aggressive expansionist theories, and do it all in the name of peace.

So when in this day I see the leaders of nations again talking peace while preparing for war, I take fearful pause...

President John Quincy Adams, 4^th July, 1821

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [the United States'] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

President Thomas Jefferson

Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one. (to Lafayette, 1815)

Should [reformers] attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all and retard indefinitely the ultimate object of their aim. (to Mme de Tesse, Mar 20, 1787)

An injured friend is the bitterest of foes. (on diplomatic relationship with France, 1793)

We wish not to meddle with the internal affairs of any country, nor with the general affairs of Europe. Peace with all nations, and the right which that gives us with respect to all nations, are our object. (to C. W. F. Dumas, 1793)

See an animated cycle of some of our Patriot of the Week advertisements. The quotes will change after about the amount of time it takes you to read each one.