"It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it"
About this Quote
Nationhood, Stone suggests, is a branding exercise masquerading as destiny. The line lands with a novelist's deadpan: a country, that supposedly sacred container of identity and history, reduced to the quick click of a label. It’s funny in the way a bad truth is funny - because it exposes how much political reality depends on agreed-upon fictions.
Stone is needling the romantic story nations tell about themselves. Borders feel immovable only after enough people repeat the same name, salute the same flag, and teach the same myths to their children. The subtext is that the hard part isn’t “creating” a country; it’s getting others to buy in, and then enforcing the purchase with paperwork, police power, and occasionally war. A name is the first spell in a long act of collective hypnosis.
In Stone’s post-Vietnam, late-Cold War American context - a period saturated with interventions, proxy states, and the manufactured rhetoric of freedom - the quote reads like a jab at how casually governments talk about remaking the world. Think tanks sketch new maps; diplomats recognize regimes; journalists adopt official terminology; and suddenly a contested patch of land becomes a “new nation,” as if existence were a press release.
As a novelist, Stone also points to the storytelling mechanics: give something a name and you give it narrative gravity. The line warns how easily language can launder ambition into legitimacy, turning human improvisation into something that looks inevitable.
Stone is needling the romantic story nations tell about themselves. Borders feel immovable only after enough people repeat the same name, salute the same flag, and teach the same myths to their children. The subtext is that the hard part isn’t “creating” a country; it’s getting others to buy in, and then enforcing the purchase with paperwork, police power, and occasionally war. A name is the first spell in a long act of collective hypnosis.
In Stone’s post-Vietnam, late-Cold War American context - a period saturated with interventions, proxy states, and the manufactured rhetoric of freedom - the quote reads like a jab at how casually governments talk about remaking the world. Think tanks sketch new maps; diplomats recognize regimes; journalists adopt official terminology; and suddenly a contested patch of land becomes a “new nation,” as if existence were a press release.
As a novelist, Stone also points to the storytelling mechanics: give something a name and you give it narrative gravity. The line warns how easily language can launder ambition into legitimacy, turning human improvisation into something that looks inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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