"Though patriotism includes a sentimental, as it were a family, feeling for place, we can distinguish the ethical motive from the sentimental. At certain times in certain countries there has been a moral urgency to be patriotic when the actual or ideal policy of a man’s nation has been a sine qua non for his conscience. But to-day patriotism, in so far as it means subordination to a specifically national policy, is superannuated. This war, we assume, is not being fought-not by most of us-for any merely national end; we are fighting it, primarily and clearly, for our lives, and secondarily, and, alas! vaguely, for a new international order."
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"Traveller's Return", in Horizon, February 1941, Reprinted in David Pierce Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Cork University Press, 2000.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_MacNeice
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Louis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was a poet and playwright of Northern Irish birth. Though not a dogmatically political writer, he is often associated with his close friends, the left-wing thirties poets: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis.
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