Motivational Quotes

Nations

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

- Acheson, Dean

Best Quotes about Nations

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. [About Russia]

Churchill, Winston

Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests.

Hochhuth, Rolf

I am like a doctor. I have written a prescription to help the patient. If the patient doesn't want all the pills I've recommended, that's up to him. But I must warn that next time I will have to come as a surgeon with a knife.

Cuellar, Javier Perez De

The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise

The more I saw of foreign countries the more I loved my own.

De Delloy

The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations--great or small--to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

Never explain yourself. Your friend don't need it and your enemies won't believe it.

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good.

Dulles, John Foster

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

11.

A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.

Burke, Edmund

12.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

Plato

13.

The simplest explanation is that it doesn't make sense.

Buechner, Professor William

14.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

This organization is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn't created to take you to heaven.

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

16.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

17.

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty six varieties of cheese?

Gaulle, Charles De

18.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

Twain, Mark

19.

The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes.

Kubrick, Stanley

20.

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

Acheson, Dean

21.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Twain, Mark

23.

If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

24.

It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales!

Bolt, Robert

25.

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Goldman, Emma

26.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

27.

I don't even know what street Canada is on.

Capone, Al

28.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

29.

China has no income tax, no unemployment and not a single soldier outside its borders.

Chou En Lai

30.

We prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war in the age of mass extermination.

Kennedy, John F.

31.

Nations have always good reasons for being what they are, and the best of all is that they cannot be otherwise.

Custine, Marquis De

32.

The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

Jerrold, Douglas William

33.

Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.

Twain, Mark

34.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

The heroes of the world community are not those who withdraw when difficulties ensue, not those who can envision neither the prospect of success nor the consequence of failure -- but those who stand the heat of battle, the fight for world peace through the United Nations.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

36.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Weil, Simone

37.

States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

38.

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam.

Milton, John

39.

The strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well ordered homes of the people.

Sigourney, Lydia

40.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts -- the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Ruskin, John

41.

Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

42.

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language -- religion -- government -- blood -- identity in these makes men of one country.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

43.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Huxley, Aldous

44.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

45.

The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members.

Truman, Harry S

46.

France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you cannot tear the toilet paper.

Wilder, Billy

47.

A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.

Briand, Aristide

48.

If there be no nobility of descent in a nation, all the more indispensable is it that there should be nobility of ascent -- a character in them that bear rule, so fine and high and pure, that as men come within the circle of its influence, they involuntarily pay homage to that which is the one pre-eminent distinction, the Royalty of Virtue.

Potter, Henry Codman

49.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

50.

The trees in Siberia are miles apart, that is why the dogs are so fast. [About Russia]

Hope, Bob