Motivational Quotes

Nations

Without a country, I am not a man.

- Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

Best Quotes about Nations

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

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.

It is equality of monotony which makes the strength of the British Isles.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.

Ruskin, John

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

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

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

10.

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

11.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

12.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy, world domination, is a fixed star. [About Russia]

Marx, Karl

14.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

Canada has never been a melting pot; more like a tossed salad.

Edinborough, Arnold

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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.

19.

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

Buechner, Professor William

20.

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

Truman, Harry S

21.

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

Bolt, Robert

22.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

23.

A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.

Carter, Jimmy

24.

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

25.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

26.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

27.

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

28.

There was never a nation that became great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

Warner, Charles Dudley

29.

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

Kennedy, John F.

30.

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

Chou En Lai

31.

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

32.

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

Plato

33.

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

De Delloy

34.

A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.

Burton, Pierre

35.

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

Churchill, Winston

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

Hugo, Victor

38.

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.

Forster, Edward M.

39.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

40.

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.

41.

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

Capone, Al

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

The less you know about a subject, the longer it takes you to explain it.

44.

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

45.

France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.

Wilder, Billy

46.

The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. Everything will be all right -- you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

Hammarskjold, Dag

47.

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

Weil, Simone

48.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

Bradbury, Malcolm

49.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

50.

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