Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Cicero, Marcus T.

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Moliere

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

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Hope, Bob

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

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

Swayze, John

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

Plato

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

10.

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

11.

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

Churchill, Winston

12.

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

13.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

15.

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

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

18.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

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

Buechner, Professor William

20.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Capone, Al

24.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

25.

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

Acheson, Dean

26.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

27.

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

Kennedy, John F.

28.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

29.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

30.

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

Twain, Mark

31.

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

Sellar, W. C.

32.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

33.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

34.

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

35.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

De Delloy

39.

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

Burton, Pierre

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

43.

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

44.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

45.

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

Bolt, Robert

46.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

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.

48.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

49.

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

50.

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