Motivational Quotes

Nations

Great countries are those that produce great people.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Nations

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.

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

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

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

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

Acheson, Dean

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

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

Chou En Lai

10.

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.

11.

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.

12.

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

Wilder, Billy

13.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

14.

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

Capone, Al

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

18.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

20.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

21.

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.

22.

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

Burke, Edmund

23.

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

Plato

24.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

25.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

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

28.

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

Moliere

29.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

30.

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

31.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

32.

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

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

Churchill, Winston

35.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

36.

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

Kennedy, John F.

37.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

38.

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

39.

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

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.

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 maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

46.

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

Bunche, Ralph

47.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

50.

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

Bolt, Robert