Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Wilder, Billy

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

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

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

Burton, Pierre

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

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Moliere

10.

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.

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.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

13.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

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.

16.

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

Bolt, Robert

17.

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.

18.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

19.

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

20.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

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

Acheson, Dean

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

27.

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

Twain, Mark

28.

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

29.

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

Custine, Marquis De

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

36.

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

Hope, Bob

37.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

38.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

39.

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

Sellar, W. C.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

44.

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

Truman, Harry S

45.

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

46.

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

De Delloy

47.

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

Weil, Simone

48.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

49.

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