Fernando Pessoa on patriotism

Love is essential. Sex, a mere accident.

Was it worthwhile?
Everything is worthwhile
if the soul is not small.

Everyone has his vanity, and each one’s vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.

Ask not what your country can do for you⁠—ask what you can do for your country.

John F. Kennedy1917–1963John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address (1961)

‘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. Chesterton1874–1936The Defendant (1901), “A Defence of Patriotism”

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Oscar Wilde1854–1900