Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Nations

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.

The United Nations is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world.

Bunche, Ralph

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

Burton, Pierre

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

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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.

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.

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

Buechner, Professor William

10.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

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

12.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

13.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

14.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

15.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

16.

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

17.

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

Twain, Mark

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.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

23.

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

Plato

24.

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

Wilder, Billy

25.

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

Custine, Marquis De

26.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

28.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

29.

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

30.

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

Hope, Bob

31.

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

Acheson, Dean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

38.

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

39.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

Moliere

44.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

49.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

50.

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

Weil, Simone