Motivational Quotes

Nations

The French complain of everything, and always.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Acheson, Dean

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

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

Plato

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

10.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

11.

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

Weil, Simone

12.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

13.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

17.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

18.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

19.

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

20.

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

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.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Burke, Edmund

24.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

The soil of their native land is dear to all the hearts of mankind.

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.

Vico, Giambattista

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

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

Swayze, John

33.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

34.

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

35.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

36.

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

Chou En Lai

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Wilder, Billy

40.

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

Twain, Mark

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

45.

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

46.

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

Capone, Al

47.

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

48.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

49.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

50.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin