Motivational Quotes

Nations

Without a country, I am not a man.

- Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Hope, Bob

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

Buechner, Professor William

If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another -- and always into a better set -- things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean -- there is nothing there. It will be what men and circumstances make it.

Herzen, Alexander

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

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

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

11.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

12.

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

Bolt, Robert

13.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

14.

The United Nations is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world.

Bunche, Ralph

15.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

16.

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

Burton, Pierre

17.

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

Ruskin, John

18.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

Weil, Simone

21.

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.

22.

Russia has abolished God, but so far God has been tolerant.

Swayze, John

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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.

25.

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

Kennedy, John F.

26.

Frenchmen have an unlimited capacity for gallantry and indulge it on every occasion.

Moliere

27.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

31.

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

32.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The wealth and prosperity of the country are only the comeliness of the body, the fullness of the flesh and fat; but the spirit is independent of them; it requires only muscle, bone and nerve for the true exercise of its functions. We cannot lose our liberty, because we cannot cease to think.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.

Sellar, W. C.

38.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

39.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

40.

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

De Delloy

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Acheson, Dean

45.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

46.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

47.

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