Ethnicity

"The introduction of the Christian religion into the world has produced an incalculable change in history. There had previously been only a history of nations — there is now a history of mankind; and the idea of an education of human nature as a whole, — an education the work of Jesus Christ Himself — is become like a compass for the historian, the key of history, and the hope of nations."

"I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community."

"Nations, like men, have their infancy."

"Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the rest!"

"If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us."

"The coming of a new life always excites our interest. Although we know in the case of the individual that it has been an infinite repetition reaching back beyond our vision, that only makes it the more wonderful. But how our interest and wonder increase when we behold the miracle of the birth of a new nation."

"Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together."

"The honor of a nation is an important thing. It is said in the Scriptures, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” It may be said, also, What doth it profit a nation if it gain the whole world, but lose its honor?"

"When the architect intends a grand structure, he makes the foundation broad and strong. We should imitate this prudence in laying the foundations of the future republic. There is a law of harmony in all departments of nature. The oak is in the acorn. The career and destiny of individual men are enfolded in the elements of which they are composed. The same is true of a nation. It will be something or it will be nothing. It will be great, or it will be small, according to its own essential qualities. As these are rich and varied, or pure and simple, slender and feeble, broad and strong, so will be the life and destiny of the nation itself. The stream cannot rise higher than its source. The ship cannot sail faster than the wind. The flight of the arrow depends upon the strength and elasticity of the bow, and as with these, so with a nation."

"The essence of nationalistic ideology is to hold homeland and nation as supreme values, conceiving them as mystical entities almost with a life of their own and having an absolute claim on the individual; whereas, in reality, they are only dissociated and formless realities, by way of their negation of any true hierarchical principle, and of any symbol or warrant of a transcendent authority. In general, the foundation of political unities that have taken form in this direction is antithetical to the traditional state. In fact, as I have said, the cement of the latter was a loyalty and fidelity that could dispense with the naturalistic fact of nationality; it was a principle of order and sovereignty that, by not being based on this fact, could even be valid in areas including more than one nationality. It was the dignities, particular rights, and castes that united or divided individuals "vertically," beyond the "horizontal" common denominator of "nation" and "homeland." In a word, it was unification from above, not from below."

"Nation states were a comparative novelty in European history. Much of the continent in 1900 was still dominated by the long-established and ethnically mixed empires of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Osmanli. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was another such entity. Some smaller countries were also ethnically heterogeneous: Belgium and Switzerland, for example. And there were numerous petty principalities and grand duchies, like Luxembourg or Lichtenstein, that had no distinct national identity of their own, yet resisted absorption into bigger political units. These patchwork political structures made practical sense at a time when mass migration was increasing rather than reducing ethnic intermingling. Yet in the eyes of political nationalists, they deserved to be consigned to the past; the future should belong to homogeneous nation states. France, which had nurtured in the Swiss political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau the prophet of popular sovereignty, also provided a kind of model for nation-building. A republic forged and re-forged in repeated revolutions and wars, France by 1900 seemed to have subsumed all its old regional identities in a single 'idea of France'. Auvergnais, Bretons and Gascons alike all considered themselves to be Frenchmen, having been put through the same standardized schooling and military training."

"As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you, And you will be the father of a multitude of nations. "No longer shall your name be called Abram, But your name shall be Abraham; For I will make you the father of a multitude of nations. "I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of you, and kings will come forth from you.…"

"The Russian past offers many lessons for the present and not just those the current powers that be want people to draw. Among those unlearned lessons, Sergey Lozenko of Sovershenno Sekretno says, is one that comes from the disasters that followed from Aleksandr Kolchak’s failure to take the nationality question seriously. In a 2,000-word article entitled “Kolchak’s Nationality Question,” the historian says what the leaders of the White Movement routinely underestimated the importance of ethnic issues and believed that any problems in that area could be solved by force alone. The result was disaster (sovsekretno.ru/articles/istoriya/natsionalnyy-vopros-kolchaka100624/)."

"And I will shake all the nations, and the precious things of all the nations will come in; and I will fill this house with glory,’ says Jehovah of armies."

"The nation that can, in the next century, show the greatest output of spiritual strength, that is the nation that shall lead the world."

"Honesty, decency, faithfulness, and comradeship, ... must be shown when dealing with those of like blood but to no one else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. . . . Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture. . . . Whether 10,000 Russian females collapse from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished."

"Like most serious students, I do not regard the 'nation' as a primary nor an unchanging social entity. It belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the 'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality except insofar as both relate to it."

"A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours."

"Look! The nations are like a drop from a bucket, And as the film of dust on the scales they are regarded. Look! He lifts up the islands like fine dust."

"Nations will certainly go to your light, and kings to the brightness of your shining forth."

"The little one will become a thousand, and the small one a mighty nation. I myself, Jehovah, will speed it up in its own time."

"She gave birth to a son, a male, who is to shepherd all the nations with an iron rod. And her child was snatched away to God and to his throne."

"Praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation!"

"[T]hough affluence is a good thing, and the spirit of compassionate reform is a good thing, in the end a nation survives only to the extent that the spirit of self-discipline and self-sacrifice is strong and vital."

"The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes."

"There are various ways to protect the nation, but nothing more is patriotic than giving one's life for the nation. This is the best patriotism."

"The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint."

"Come all you true friends of the nation, attend to humanity's call!"

"The nation is worth fighting for."

"Every nation, like every individual, has received a mission that it must fulfil."

"Consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that humane capacity can soar to."

"If it is worth a bloody struggle to establish this nation, it is worth one to preserve it."

"No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country - thus far shalt thou go and no further."

"What do we call a nation? – People who are of the same origin and who speak the same words and who live and make friends of each other, who have the same customs and songs and entertainment are what we call a nation, and the place where that people lives is called the people's country."

"The disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all the people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God's design."

"Humanity without Nationality is empty, nationality without humanity is blind."

"This is the vanity of every principality—and notable for a nation—that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone else is determined."

"No nation can plan its future without coming to terms with its past."

"We shall have to learn again to be one nation, or one day we shall be no nation."

"You can construct a nation on an idea; but you cannot reconstruct a nation on the basis of one."

"From a single crime know the nation."

"A nation is created by families, a religion, traditions: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children."

"No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation."

"In those days ten men out of all the languages of the nations will take hold, yes, they will take firm hold of the robe of a Jew, saying: “We want to go with you, for we have heard that God is with you people."

"Many of the countries that achieved formal sovereignty through decolonization in the post-World War II period emerged as extremely weak States. That is, they emerged with a level of institutional capacity-of "infrastructural power," in Michael Mann's useful conceptualization-well below the minimum level one usually associates with the notion of "sovereign State." Looking at the phenomenon from the perspective of the international system, Robert Jackson has suggested that decolonization brought with it an unprecedented disjunction between "negative" and "positive" sovereignty-that is, between sovereignty in the traditional sense and empirical Statehood, producing "quasi-States." Whereas in the past, States gained sovereignty only if they mustered the internal capacity to withstand the challenges of other States at the international level, in the contemporary world the situation is partially reversed, in that some of the new States are able to maintain their sovereignty only with the support of the international system. While decolonization has certainly resulted in the proliferation of "weak States," Jackson exaggerates the newness of the phenomenon; indeed he himself acknowledges that the "new sovereignty game" originated under the League of Nations, when the application of the principle of national self-determination produced a plethora of countries in the Balkans and northern Europe whose capacity for "empirical" Statehood was open to question. In any case, it is quite evident that the resumption of imperial disintegration within eastern Europe following the collapse of Communism is producing additional "quasi-States." Weak States are prone to protracted internal conflicts, and due to the widespread availability of cheap, rapid-fire weapons, such conflicts are likely to involve high levels of violence."

"Not gold but only men can make A people great and strong; Men who for truth and honor's sake Stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep, Who dare while others fly— They build a nation's pillars deep And lift them to the sky."

"Cleanse the body of this nation Through the glory of the Lord."

"Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national program that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers."

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

"A nation that can not preserve itself ought to die, and it will die—die in the grasp of the evils it is too feeble to overthrow."

"What defines a people is not race, not tradition, not geography, but the free choice of a group of human beings to live together as fellow citizens."

"Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."

"I know three things must always be To keep a nation strong and free. One is a hearthstone bright and dear, With busy, happy loved ones near. One is a ready heart and hand To love, and serve, and keep the land. is a worn and beaten way where the people go to pray. long as these are kept alive, Nation and people will survive. God keep them always, everywhere— The home, the heart, the place of prayer."

"I think most people associate race with biology and ethnicity with culture. It's important to stress the culture and language part of it. Ethnicity isn't just a question of affiliation; it's also a question of choice. It's also a question of group membership. And it's usually associated with a geographic region. It's also often confused or conflated with nationality, but that's not the same thing. Today people identify with ethnicity positively because they see themselves as being part of that group. People can't just simply say, "Well, I want to become a member of that race." You either are or are not a member of that race. Whereas, if you wanted to look at ethnicity based on culture, you could learn a language, you can learn customs - there are things that you can learn so that you could belong to that group."

"'Race' and 'ethnicity' are poorly defined terms that serve as flawed surrogates for multiple environmental and genetic factors in disease causation, including ancestral geographic origins, socioeconomic status, education and access to health care."

"Vibrant human diversity is now commonplace in major cities throughout the world. Some celebrate such a mix of human diversity. Others deplore it, preferring that so-called races be separated both geographically and reproductively. Even today, some people retain the once-popular belief that the 'white' race is superior in intellect, health, and other attributes. Although far more people reject the notion of white supremacy today than in the past, its legacy remains, as evidenced by economic stratification, ongoing segregation, and classification by racial categories. Even among those who reject the supposed superiority of a particular ethnicity over any other, the perception of distinct, genetically determined human races often persists."

"'Two peoples never meet,' the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits once wrote, 'but they mingle their blood.' Mingling, however, is only one of a range of options when two diverse human populations meet. The minority group may remain distinct for breeding purposes but become integrated into the majority group in all or some other respects (language, religious belief, dress, lifestyle). Alternatively, interbreeding can go on, at least for a time, but one or both of the two groups may nevertheless preserve or even adopt distinct cultural or ethnic identities. Here is an important distinction. Whereas 'race' is a matter of inherited physical characteristics, transmitted from parents to children in DNA, 'ethnicity' is a combination of language, custom and ritual, inculcated in the home, the school and the temple. It is perfectly possible for a genetically intermixed population to split into two or more biologically indistinguishable but culturally differentiated ethnic groups. The process may be voluntary, but it may also be based on coercion - notably where major changes of religious belief are concerned. One or both groups may even opt for residential and other forms of segregation; the majority may insist that the minority lives in a clearly delineated space, or the minority may choose to do so for its own reasons. The two groups may cordially ignore one another, or there may be friction, perhaps leading to civil strife or one-sided massacres. The groups may fight one another or one group may submit to expulsion by the other. Genocide is the extreme case, in which one group attempts to annihilate the other."

"Science fiction implies that the knots of terrestrial racism will eventually loosen because Terrans will have to unite against the aliens, androids, or BEMs [Bug-Eyed Monsters] of the galaxy. Under these circumstances, humans become remarkable for their humanity, not their ethnicity. Robert Scholes seems to have this concept in mind when he remarks that science fiction as a form “has been a bit advanced in its treatment of race and race relations. Because of their orientation toward the future, science fiction writers frequently assumed that America’s major problem in this area—black/white relations—would improve or even wither away.“ . . . While Scholes and others conveniently assume that distinctions based on race will become invalid in possible future worlds and that it is therefore unnecessary for a character to have a distinct racial background, their presumed total eradication of distinctions based on color or ethnicity seems doubtful short of the Millenium."

"To whom does an ethnographer owe his or her greatest allegiance? Is it to the people studied, to the sovereign government of the country where research takes place, to the agency or foundation that funds the ethnographer’s research, to the academic or research institution that employs the ethnographer, or to the community of scholars to which the ethnographer belongs? Should ethnographers be expected only to add to humanity’s knowledge of itself or should they be expected to provide more tangible benefits to the people they study or to the world at large? Should ethnographers be held to a higher standard than the one applied to journalists, filmmakers, or photographers who also report on their fellow human beings? These, too, are unresolved questions, subject to lively debate."

"Overcoming dozens of expedition routes in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the islands of Oceania — as a journalist, photographer, and explorer of little-known corners of the planet — one is imbued with the traditions and customs of indigenous peoples. The term “ethnography” is a combination of the Greek words “ethnos” and “description”. Following the principles of “cultural immersion”, observing ethnic groups at the early stages of socio-economic development — for a while you become one of them, so that later, like an actor who has played a role, to get out of the image, recreating in books the passed, seen, felt."