The nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. 

Greg Bear, Eons

Umberto Eco on nationalism

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion…. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

If studying history mainly makes you feel happy and proud, you probably aren’t really studying history.

Quoted without attribution by Fara Dabhoiwala in the New York Review (July 1, 2021)

Friendships that are purely of our own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication of climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world free and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits.

Montaigne