Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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

Twain, Mark

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Weil, Simone

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

10.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Moliere

12.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

13.

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

De Delloy

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

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

Hope, Bob

16.

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

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 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

19.

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

Bunche, Ralph

20.

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

21.

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

Bolt, Robert

22.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

23.

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

24.

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

Burton, Pierre

25.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

27.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

28.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

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.

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

Wilder, Billy

31.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Buechner, Professor William

35.

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

Plato

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

39.

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

40.

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

Chou En Lai

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

44.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

45.

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.

46.

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

Wilder, Billy

47.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

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

49.

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

Kennedy, John F.

50.

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