Education Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer goes for the throat here, and the insult is the argument. Calling patriotism a "dirty fellow" is more than snobbery: it frames nationalism as something that tracks mud into a room that depends on clean methods. The "domain of learning" is imagined as a household with rules - evidence, clarity, intellectual honesty. Patriotism barges in with different priorities: loyalty over truth, team spirit over skepticism, pride over precision. Toss him "out of doors" is comedic in its bluntness, but it also signals a moral boundary. Scholarship is not just another arena where we wave flags.

The subtext is Schopenhauer's contempt for the way collective identity recruits the mind. Patriotism, in his view, is a shortcut emotion: it grants meaning and belonging cheaply, then demands repayment in the currency of conformity. Once it "wants to make itself felt", it stops being private affection and becomes pressure, a social force that decides what may be researched, praised, or even said without penalty. That "wants" matters - it implies patriotism is opportunistic, creeping into learning precisely because learning confers legitimacy.

Context helps. Writing in an era of rising German nationalism and Romantic mythmaking, Schopenhauer distrusted mass movements and state-friendly metaphysics. His target isn't cultural pride in the abstract; it's the moment when scholarship becomes propaganda's laundering machine. The line still stings because it names a familiar temptation: to treat knowledge as another branch of public relations, and to confuse defending "us" with understanding anything at all.