Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

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

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Plato

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Edinborough, Arnold

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

10.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

11.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

12.

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

Chou En Lai

13.

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

Buechner, Professor William

14.

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

15.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

17.

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

Moliere

18.

Potter, Henry Codman

19.

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

Burke, Edmund

20.

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.

21.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Custine, Marquis De

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Sellar, W. C.

34.

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

Churchill, Winston

35.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

37.

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.

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.

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

40.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

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

Capone, Al

46.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

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

48.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

49.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

50.

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.