Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Kubrick, Stanley

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

17.

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

Burton, Pierre

18.

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

Swayze, John

19.

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

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

Kennedy, John F.

22.

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.

23.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

24.

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

25.

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

26.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Plato

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Bolt, Robert

33.

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

Burke, Edmund

34.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Chou En Lai

38.

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

Wilder, Billy

39.

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

Custine, Marquis De

40.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

41.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

42.

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

Hope, Bob

43.

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

Wilder, Billy

44.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

45.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

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.

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