These national identity quotes will inspire you. National Identity is a sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging national identity quotes, national identity sayings, and national identity proverbs.
Famous National Identity Quotes
- “The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.” ~ Slobodan Milosević
- “Theatre has no national identity. It is something for the world, whether it is Irish, English, or French.” ~ Cyril Cusack
- “You talked about national identity cards and the terrorism bill. We have made a government that has grown used to viewing us as subjects, has grown used to seeing its role as commanding us.” ~ Malcolm Wallop
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“We don’t need a nation that has national identity cards.” ~ Malcolm Wallop
- “Vietnamese must be made to feel that they are racial inferiors with no right to national identity.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
- “Nations which don’t find their national identities will be preyed upon by other nations.” ~ Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
- “Part of America’s genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores.” ~ Barack Obama
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“National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.” ~ Umberto Eco
- “It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn’t before.” ~ Robert Dessaix
- “People are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world. It starts looking different and disorienting. And there is no doubt that that has produced populist movements both from the left and from the right in many countries in Europe.” ~ Barack Obama
- “National identity is a motion. It’s something you’re inside, you don’t get what’s happening, you can’t see it from above. And that’s where you have to write. You can’t see what’s happening now or what’s going to happen, so you just dive into it and write.” ~ Karl Ove Knausgard
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“Trump’s “Make America Great Again” program trumpets a national identity built on scapegoating, self-pity and grandiosity, and the promise of a strongman.” ~ Susan Faludi
- “Different nations have different ways of forming their national identity. In America, for instance, the model was one of homogeneity breaking from different backgrounds, and the whole effort was to blend them all together like a wonderful making of a milkshake!” ~ Kabir Bedi
- “Globalisation, which benefits only multi-national companies and takes away all sense of local or national pride and identity, is the biggest threat facing all the member states of the EU.” ~ Steve Blake
- “The identity of just one thing, the “clash of civilization” view that you’re a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian, I think that’s such a limited way of seeing humanity, and schools have the opportunity to bring out the fact that we have hundreds of identities. We have our national identity. We have our cultural identity, linguistic identity, religious identity. Yes, cultural identity, professional identity, all kinds of ways.” ~ Amartya Sen
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“I’ve never felt British. I’m just not interested in national identity. I don’t know why.” ~ Elvis Costello
- “The basis of national identity is to say, “This is authentic to me or my forebears,” and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I’m working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who’s looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?” ~ Ben Katchor
- “Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one’s character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person… if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.” ~ Clive James
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“Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.” ~ Ron Chernow
- “We are undermining a generation’s happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity” ~ Dennis Prager
- “Almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany today have a foreign background. The problem is that Germany can’t really offer foreigners an identity because the Germans hardly have a national identity themselves. That is certainly a result of Auschwitz.” ~ Bassam Tibi
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“The Palestinian people have no national identity.
I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.” ~ Yasser Arafat
- “The new culture war is about national identity rather than religion and ‘transcendent authority.’ It focuses on which groups the United States will formally admit to residence and citizenship. It asks the same question as the old culture war: ‘Who are we?’ But the earlier query was primarily about how we define ourselves morally. The new question is about how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of the oldest questions in our history, going back to our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and 1850s.” ~ E. J. Dionne
- “We, the people. Manifest Destiny. Conceived in liberty. Fear itself. Ask not. Morning in America. United we stand. Yes, we can. In times of great change and tumult, presidents seek to inspire beleaguered Americans by reminding them of their national identity.” ~ Ron Fournier
- “We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn’t going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous.” ~ Terence McKenna
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“American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.” ~ Tom Hooper
- “We’ll explain the appeal of curling to you if you explain the appeal of the National Rifle Association to us.” ~ Andy Barrie
- “Many Canadian nationalists harbor the bizarre fear that should we ever reject royalty, we would instantly mutate into Americans, as though the Canadian sense of self is so frail and delicate a bud, that the only thing stopping it from being swallowed whole by the US is an English lady in a funny hat.” ~ Will Ferguson
- “The English are worried about the Euro being brought in because of loss of national identity and rising prices. In Scotland, people are just worried in case they have to close Poundstretcher.” ~ Frankie Boyle
- “In the ’30s and ’40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half-million of the nation’s Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.” ~ Susan Faludi
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“Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine” ~ Cassandra Clare
- “Vietnam is unique of all the countries in the world, I believe, in having the longest continuous struggle against foreign aggression of any country that has retained its national identity.” ~ Tom Hayden
- “Canadians were the first anti-Americans and the best. Canadian anti-Americanism, just as the country’s French-English duality, has for two centuries been the central buttress of our national identity.” ~ Jack Granatstein
- “Some of the best work that’s happening right now is from architects who have remained in their home countries and who have focused on a local or national identity and the idea of critical regionalism.” ~ Cameron Sinclair
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“After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity – ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.” ~ Cameron Sinclair
- “Religion appears in so many contexts in WW1. Religion shaped the national identities and ambitions of several of the key players, especially Germany and Russia, both of which defined themselves as messianic nations. In both countries too, secular elites delved deeply into apocalyptic and prophetic ideas, giving their nations a millenarian bent.” ~ Philip Jenkins
- “One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death.” ~ Jeanette Winterson
- “It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its center. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity.” ~ Linda Colley
- “It was measured that the splinters of the Armenian nation that had managed to miraculously escape the Genocide would not be able to recover from the blow, would disappear in the whirlpools on five continents, lose their national identity, and aptitude to be a political factor. But we, as a nation and as a state, were able to reappear at the international arena to affirm that we continue our eternal journey and that we are determined not to allow for such a crime to ever happen again.” ~ Serzh Sargsyan
