Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Sigourney, Lydia

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

Truman, Harry S

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

De Delloy

10.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

14.

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

Burton, Pierre

15.

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

Wilder, Billy

16.

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

17.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

18.

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

Burke, Edmund

19.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

20.

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

21.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

22.

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

Buechner, Professor William

23.

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

24.

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

Swayze, John

25.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Custine, Marquis De

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

32.

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

33.

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

Churchill, Winston

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Capone, Al

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

40.

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

Acheson, Dean

41.

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

Weil, Simone

42.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

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.

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

Bolt, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Wilder, Billy

48.

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

Plato

49.

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

50.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur