Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Jerrold, Douglas William

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

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

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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 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

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.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

10.

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

Plato

11.

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

12.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

16.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

17.

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

Wilder, Billy

18.

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

Kennedy, John F.

19.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

20.

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

Buechner, Professor William

21.

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

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

24.

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

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

Twain, Mark

26.

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

De Delloy

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Churchill, Winston

30.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

31.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

32.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

36.

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

Burton, Pierre

37.

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

Weil, Simone

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

40.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

41.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Ruskin, John

45.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

46.

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

Burke, Edmund

47.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

48.

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

49.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

50.

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.