Daily Inspiration Quote by Denis Diderot

Patriotism, Diderot implies, isn’t a steady flame; it’s a flare-up. The sting is in “ephemeral motive”: he strips patriotism of its costume as virtue and treats it as a useful, temporary emotion - closer to adrenaline than ethics. That framing is classic Enlightenment skepticism: distrust the passions, especially the ones leaders can summon on command.

The line works because it demotes patriotism from identity to instrument. “Scarcely ever” is a sly qualifier - not an absolute dismissal, but a statistical insult. And “particular threat” matters: Diderot isn’t talking about timeless devotion to a homeland; he’s describing a crowd psychology that spikes when danger is legible and immediate. Once the threat recedes, the feeling expires, and the public returns to private life. The subtext is sharp: if patriotism needs enemies to stay alive, it becomes a political technology that quietly depends on crisis.

Contextually, Diderot is writing in a Europe where monarchy and church leaned hard on national and religious sentiment, while wars and imperial contests made “society under threat” a recurring storyline. As an editor and architect of the Encyclopedie, he’s invested in replacing inherited loyalties with reasoned commitments: rights, laws, material welfare. Read this way, the quote is less anti-country than anti-manipulation. It warns that when patriotism is treated as the highest civic good, politics starts to require emergencies - or to manufacture them.