Quaequam Blog!

“…patriotism could be dangerous. It was regarded in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries as a profoundly anti-authority ideology (hence the Tory Dr Johnson’s famous jibe: ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’). Patriots – ‘your prating Patriots’, as one loyalist propaganda organ called them – were people who believed in the defence of British liberties against British governments who were trampling them underfoot.”

(from Bernard Porter ‘The absent-minded imperialists’ (OUP, 2004) p.119. )

Take care in quoting Johnson!