Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Love of and devotion to one's country.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Love of one's country; the passion which moves a person to serve his country, either in defending it from invasion or in protecting its rights and maintaining its laws and institutions.
  • noun Love of country embodied or personified; patriots collectively.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Love of country; devotion to the welfare of one's country; the virtues and actions of a patriot; the passion which inspires one to serve one's country.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun love of country; devotion to the welfare of one's compatriots; the virtues and actions of a patriot; the passion which inspires one to serve one's country
  • noun the desire to compete with other nations; nationalism

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From patriot +‎ -ism

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word patriotism.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. ~George Santayana

    Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. ~Bertrand Russell

    Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. ~Mark Twain

    Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. ~George Bernard Shaw

    He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

    What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child? ~Lin Yutang

    If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident. ~Montesquieu

    Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him? ~Blaise Pascal, quoted by Tolstoy in Bethink Yourselves

    January 28, 2007

  • They say that patriotism is the last refuge

    to which a scoundrel clings.

    Steal a little and they throw you in jail,

    steal a lot and they make you king."

    Bob Dylan, Sweetheart Like You

    November 1, 2007

  • "Considering the evil results that patriotism is fraught with for the average man, it is as nothing compared with the insult and injury that patriotism heaps upon the soldier himself, that poor, deluded victim of superstition and ignorance. He, the savior of his country, the protector of his nation, what has patriotism in store for him? A life of slavish submission, vice, and perversion, during peace; a life of danger, exposure, and death, during war."

    - Emma Goldman, 'Patriotism, A Menace To Liberty', 1911.

    March 1, 2009