Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Twain, Mark

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Capone, Al

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

Hope, Bob

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

Burke, Edmund

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.

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

Sellar, W. C.

10.

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

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.

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.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

19.

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.

20.

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

Buechner, Professor William

21.

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

Bolt, Robert

22.

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

Truman, Harry S

23.

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

24.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

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

27.

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

Moliere

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.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

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

31.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

32.

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

Churchill, Winston

33.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

34.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

36.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

37.

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

38.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

40.

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

Wilder, Billy

41.

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

Kennedy, John F.

42.

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

Weil, Simone

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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.

46.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

47.

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

48.

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

Swayze, John

49.

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

50.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De