Motivational Quotes

Nations

Great countries are those that produce great people.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Burke, Edmund

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

Twain, Mark

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

Bolt, Robert

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

15.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

Burton, Pierre

18.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

19.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

20.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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.

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

Churchill, Winston

23.

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

Weil, Simone

24.

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

Swayze, John

25.

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

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.

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

Plato

28.

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.

29.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Moliere

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

35.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

37.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

38.

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

39.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

40.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

41.

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

Kennedy, John F.

42.

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

Sellar, W. C.

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

Wilder, Billy

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Ruskin, John

49.

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

50.

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

Gaulle, Charles De