"What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones."
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
"There is Ontario patriotism Quebec patriotism or Western patriotism each based on the hope that it may swallow up the others but there is no Canadian patriotism and we can have no Canadian nation..."
- Henri Bourassa
"I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish."
- Marianne Moore
"The mind supplies the idea of a nation but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams."
- Andre Malraux
"My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Pari..."
- Karl Beveridge
"A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and hope to do great things together in the future."
- Frank Underhill
"The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business."
- William Faulkner
"Ireland is a fatal disease fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen."
- George Moore