Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Swayze, John

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.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

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

Acheson, Dean

10.

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

11.

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

Weil, Simone

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

15.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

16.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

17.

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.

18.

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

Ruskin, John

19.

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

20.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

Kennedy, John F.

23.

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

Bolt, Robert

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

28.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

33.

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

Truman, Harry S

34.

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

35.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Hope, Bob

39.

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

40.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

41.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

42.

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

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

45.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

46.

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

Moliere

47.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

48.

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.

49.

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

De Delloy

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