A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
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I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
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Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, A Piece of My Mind; The Cold War and the Income Tax; the introduction to Patriotic Gore.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.
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When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism. |
