About a year ago, a DI reader named Mike Baker offered me his collection of quotes, including these quotes on patriotism. Thanks, Mike.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
~ Edward Abbey

Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.
~ John Adams (1735 – 1826)

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
~ James A. Baldwin

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
~ G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)

“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”
~ Clarence S. Darrow

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world. ~Diogenes

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
~ Albert Einstein

When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
~ Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
~ Guy de Maupassant

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
~ Blaise Pascal

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph:
~ Haile Selassie

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.”
~Mark Twain

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
~ Voltaire