Motivational Quotes

Nations

The French complain of everything, and always.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Nations

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

Twain, Mark

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Moliere

14.

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

Churchill, Winston

15.

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.

16.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

17.

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

18.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

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.

20.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

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.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

23.

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

24.

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

Kennedy, John F.

25.

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

Wilder, Billy

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

Ruskin, John

28.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

29.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

30.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

31.

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

32.

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

Burke, Edmund

33.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

34.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

40.

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

Sellar, W. C.

41.

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

42.

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

Custine, Marquis De

43.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

44.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

45.

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

Plato

46.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Truman, Harry S

50.

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