Motivational Quotes

Nations

The French complain of everything, and always.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Nations

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Twain, Mark

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.

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

Acheson, Dean

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

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

10.

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

Moliere

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

De Delloy

15.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

16.

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

17.

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

Plato

18.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

19.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

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

21.

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

Sellar, W. C.

22.

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

Chou En Lai

23.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

25.

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

Weil, Simone

26.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

27.

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

28.

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

Wilder, Billy

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

Buechner, Professor William

31.

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

Swayze, John

32.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

33.

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

34.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

35.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

36.

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

37.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

38.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

39.

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

Custine, Marquis De

40.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

41.

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

42.

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

Ruskin, John

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Truman, Harry S

48.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

49.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

50.

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