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

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

—Samuel Johnson

But if patriotic sentiment is wanted,
I've patriotic ballads cut and dried;
For where'er our country's banner may be planted,
All other local banners are defied!
Our warriors, in serried ranks assembled,
Never quail -- or they conceal it if they do --
And I shouldn't be surprised if nations trembled

Before the mighty troops of Titipu!

—Nanki-Poo, The Mikado

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.'

For given the chance, she can prove it. Surprisingly she still has her passport. Battered, creased, stamped Ghetoisiert, it lies in the breast pocket of her gray suit under the yellow star. With their peculiar respect for official paper the Germans had not confiscated or destroyed it...She knows it will not protect her. International law does not exist for her, or for any rider on this train. Still, in this crowd of unfortunates it is a unique identifying document, and to a German eye, the photograph of a husband in a United States naval uniform should also strike home...But her ultimate hope is a mirage: namely that some farseeing SS officer will take her under his wing, so as to lean on her as a character witness after the German defeat. What she cannot conceive is that most Germans do not yet believe they will lose the war.

—Natalie Henry headed toward Auschwitz, from War and Remembrance by Hermann Wouk.