Nationhood Quotes

“We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.”
― Jasmine Ann Cooray

“The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state ... National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide - freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want - in a word: "happiness".”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The other side of 1984

“The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place.”
― Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People

“Tiranos sao eleitos e depostos.
Leis sao passadas e repelidas.
Nacoes surgem e caem.
A liberdade do individuo e' eterna”
― A.E. Samaan

“If you look at it closely, every individual is a separate entity, state and culture. The macro state is a federation of citizens who accept to live under the same law.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom

“The Arabic Qur'an and authoritative Christian translations of the Bible into a limited number of languages contributed profoundly to the universalisation of a single ethnic religious—linguistic community in the Muslim case and to the distinction between major written languages and dialectic vernaculars in the Christian case. While the Islamic socio-political impact was thus in principle almost entirely anti-ethnic and anti-national, the Christian impact was more complex. Its willingness to translate brought with it, undoubtedly, a reduction in the number of ethnicities and vernaculars, but then a confirmation of the individual identity of those that remained: Christianity in fact helped turn ethnicities into nations.”
― Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism

“No nation has been on earth since the beginning of time and the very concept of nationhood is pretty recent. Despite that, most nations look upon their own existence as a self-evident destiny conferred by God, or by Nature, since time immemorial. Nations tend to think of their cultures and political systems, even their frontiers, as the work of Man, but they see their national existence as a transcendent fact, beyond all question”
― Milan Kundera

“The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air—so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again, a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, Vol. 3: The Democratic Experience

“As principal chief Chad Smith told me, many people saying they are Cherokee likely have some ancestry. However, their ancestors ‘expatriated from the nation’ and renounced their tribal ties by failing to travel west on the Trail of Tears. The cost of that decision is that their descendants cannot now claim citizenship. Cherokee Nation Supreme Court justice Troy Wayne Poteete further emphasizes the often emotion, group kindship nation of the issue, fine details often missed by non-Indians claiming Indian status. ‘Our issue is no our ancestors had so little to pass on to us. We lost 90 percent of what we had. What they were able to pass on to us was a unique legal status, as well as a distinct culture and heritage.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“If nations are founded not in unity but in exchange, both exchange within a national territory whose boundaries are largely arbitrary, and exchange with cultures that are other to them in time and space, then those bugbears of Scottish cultural history - Lowland Scotland's adoption of the iconography of a Highland Celtic identity and the country's increasing 'Anglicisation' - can be read not as the signs of failed nationhood but as evidence of a nation which has grasped that its real resources are generated by its capacity for cultural export, translation and assimilation.”
― Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment

“Well, George Buchanan was a bit of a romancer, there's no denying; he gave Scotland the credit of being a nation long after we ceased to be one... who are we to mock George Buchanan?”
― Ann Scott-Moncrieff, Chapman 47-48: Tom Scott / Ann Scott-Moncrieff

“We must recover a sense of nationhood,' said Maclean, 'Like Ireland.'
'I think we must first recover a sense of identity,' said David. 'Until we know who we are, there's little use in finding out what we are.”
― J.F. Hendry, Fernie Brae: A Scottish Childhood

“Nations are first written in ink before they are defended in blood.”
― Richman Gumbere, The Ink and Epoch That Build Nations!: Poems that Till the Mind, Sow Conscience, and Harvest a Nation