Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Buechner, Professor William

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Swayze, John

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

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

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

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

10.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

11.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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.

14.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

15.

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

16.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

22.

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

Chou En Lai

23.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

24.

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

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

28.

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

Capone, Al

29.

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

Weil, Simone

30.

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

Moliere

31.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

32.

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.

33.

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

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.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

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.

37.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

38.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

39.

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

De Delloy

40.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

41.

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

Custine, Marquis De

42.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

Bolt, Robert

44.

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

45.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

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

47.

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

Buechner, Professor William

48.

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

49.

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

Burke, Edmund

50.

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.