Flags Quotes - Page 23

• A flag is supposed to represent everything that a country does. It doesn't only represent the good things. If you burn the flag, you're burning the flag for what you perceive to be the bad things the country has done. it's only a symbol. It's only a piece of cloth.

  George Carlin

  Country, Burning, Done

  George Carlin (2009). “Last Words”, p.122, Simon and Schuster

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• We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!

  Eddie Izzard

  Country, India, Use

  "Dress to Kill", 1998.

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• THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

  Anne Carson

  Stars, Gun, Perfect

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• Identification with the rag called the national flag is an emotional and sentimental factor and for that factor you are willing to kill another - and that is called, the love of your country, love of the neighbor . . .? One can see that where sentiment and emotion come in, love is not.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Country, Love Is, Emotional

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1992). “The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti: 1966-1967 : Perennial questions”, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

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• When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

  John McPhee

  Ocean, Moving, Writing

  "Basin and Range". Book by John McPhee, 1981; reprinted in his book "Annals of the Former World", 1998.

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• The man who tries to make the flag an object of a single party is a greater traitor to that flag than any man who fires at it.

  David Lloyd George

  Party, Men, Fire

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• Anyone who says the Confederate Flag is a symbol of hate should be required to go to sensitivity training classes.

  Ezola B. Foster

  Hate, Class, Training

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• Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

  Arundhati Roy

  Government, People, Mind

  Arundhati Roy (2003). “War Talk”, p.47, South End Press

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• Unless you call attention to your presence who will know you're there? Even a country has to weave and wave a flag as proof of its existence.

  Rod McKuen

  Country, Attention, Wave

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• But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life?" "Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag.

  Haruki Murakami

  Army, Games, Needs

  Haruki Murakami (1993). “Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel”, Vintage

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• I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.

  Molly Ivins

  Funny, Humorous, Political

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• It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

  Stephen King

  Memories, War, Cancer

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• Good women are no fun... The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.

  Mae West

  Sarcastic, Witty, Fun

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• The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

  John Steinbeck

  War, Believe, Heart

  John Steinbeck (2003). “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction”, p.146, Penguin

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• How're we getting to King's Cross tomorrow, Dad?" asked Fred as they dug into a sumptuous pudding. "The Ministry's providing a couple of cars," said Mr. Weasley. Everyone looked up at him. "Why?" said Percy curiously. "It's because of you, Perce," said George seriously. "And there'll be little flags on the hoods, with HB on them-" "-for Humongous Bighead," said Fred.

  J. K. Rowling

  Family, Kings, Dad

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• You have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement." "This movement of yours, does it have slogans?" inquired the Chink. "Right on!" they cried. And they quoted him some. "Your movement, does it have a flag?" asked the Chink. "You bet!" and they described their emblem. "And does your movement have leaders?" "Great leaders." "Then shove it up your butts," said the Chink. "I have taught you nothing.

  Tom Robbins

  Taught Us, Leader, Doe

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• It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

  James A. Baldwin

  Killing, Shock, Allegiance

  Speech at Cambridge University, 17 Feb. 1965, in New York Times Magazine 7 March 1965, p. 32

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• A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Rain, Clouds, Air

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.104, New Directions Publishing

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• A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Baby, Cheer, Children

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.320, Faber & Faber

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• Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Cat, Heart, Dry Up

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.66, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.

  Sarah Vowell

  Hate, War, Coffee

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• I interviewed my dad on video in his final weeks. When I asked about his work and finding meaning through helping others, he responded, "I don't think you can be focused on, 'Oh gee, I want to make a difference.' It has to be spontaneous. If it's not...there's some kind of egotistical thing going on. That's a red flag. You hope you impact people on the deepest level you are capable of at the time. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. You're trying.

  Lisa Shannon

  Dad, Helping Others, Thinking

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• Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn't really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we no longer need politics.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Children, Blessed, Race

  Lewis H. Lapham (1995). “Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-siècle”, p.18, Verso

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• (Obama's) a nice person, he's very articulate this is what's been used against him, but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.

  Dan Rather

  Nice, Racism, Racist

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• Patriotism is merely a religion-love of country, worship of country, devotion to the country's flag and honor and welfare.

  Mark Twain

  Country, Patriotism, Honor

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.349, Courier Corporation

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