Motivational Quotes

Nations

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.

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Custine, Marquis De

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Chou En Lai

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

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

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

Burton, Pierre

10.

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

Swayze, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

De Delloy

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

17.

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

Sellar, W. C.

18.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

19.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

20.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Hope, Bob

25.

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

Bunche, Ralph

26.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

27.

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

Ruskin, John

28.

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

29.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

30.

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

31.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

33.

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

Churchill, Winston

34.

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.

35.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

37.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

41.

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

Capone, Al

42.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

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

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

46.

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

47.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

48.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

49.

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

50.

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