nationalism

The Church is larger than any one nation or any one political scene.

The church's primary purpose is not to make America more Christian, but to make American Christians less American and Rwandan Christians less Rwandan. We are no longer Rwandans or Americans, neither Hutu nor Tutsi. If we are in Christ, we have become part of a new creation.

We are asking if thought can be aware of itself. That is rather a complex question, and requires very careful observation. Thought has created wars through nationalism, through sectarian religions. Thought has created all this; God has not created the hierarchy of the church--the pope, all the robes, all the rituals, the swinging of the incense, the candles. All that paraphernalia that goes on in a cathedral or in a church is put together by thought, copied, some of it, from the ancient Egyptians, from the ancient Hindus, and Hebrews. It is all thought. So "God" is created by thought.

And I thought, y__now, I mean_this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It__ not, y__now, __urple mountain__ majesty_ or __ruited plains,_ whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn__ a place, it__ an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I__ the child of immigrants. My father__ lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he__ somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra

Will there be people who will have the conscience to contribute to the country by changing themselves first? That is the need of the moment.

Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.

But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people...

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

Many groups use the media and successfully manipulate what Theodor Adorno calls our psychological frailty. This psychological frailty correlates to anxiety. It also precedes and foments fascism, sexism, and racism.Because of our sense of free will, day-to-day anxiety can creep in as a form of guilt or the desire to belong / be loved.It is this frailty that is manipulated which may later be expressed in fascism, nationalism, sexism, racism.It's based on superego storytelling. But what's going on concurrent with all this is a shift from storytelling to storymaking.There's an entire subgroup, mostly the younger generations, that have been participating in gaming and social media in a way that will bring about a new synergy. This is Hegel's dialect approach to society.Jane McGonigal talks about this in her book Reality is Broken, Cathy Davis talks about this in her book Now You See It, Clay Shirky talks about this in his books Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody. Tapscott talks about this in his book Wikinomics.

Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to.

Show me the heroes that the youth of your country look up to, and I will tell you the future of your country.

The rest of the rebels were recruited from the ranks of the young and excitable and had rather more enthusiasm than skill.

Our side has agents. Their side has spies.

Many people tell me that I should become a politician but I tell them no I want to do something good for the nation.

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.