Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.

The saying draws a moral boundary between two closely related political emotions. “Patriotism” is framed as an affirmative attachment—care, loyalty, and responsibility toward one’s own community—while “nationalism” is defined as a comparative, exclusionary posture that needs an enemy and feeds on resentment of outsiders. The contrast implies that love of country can be civic and generous, but becomes corrosive when it turns into a hierarchy of peoples. As a maxim, it is often used to warn that intense national feeling is not automatically virtuous: its ethical character depends on whether it motivates service and solidarity or hostility and scapegoating.