Motivational Quotes

Nations

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

- Kipling, Rudyard

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

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

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

Burton, Pierre

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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.

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

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

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

Gaulle, Charles De

10.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

11.

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

Acheson, Dean

12.

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

Chou En Lai

13.

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

Sellar, W. C.

14.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

15.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

16.

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

17.

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

Burke, Edmund

18.

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

19.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

24.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

25.

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.

26.

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.

27.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Kennedy, John F.

32.

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

33.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

34.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

35.

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

Bolt, Robert

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

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

38.

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

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

Wilder, Billy

40.

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

41.

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

Plato

42.

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

Capone, Al

43.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

44.

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

De Delloy

45.

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

46.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

47.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

50.

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