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

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

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

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

Plato

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

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

Moliere

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

Burke, Edmund

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

Capone, Al

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.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

Churchill, Winston

13.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

14.

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

Bunche, Ralph

15.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Buechner, Professor William

19.

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

Acheson, Dean

20.

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

Kennedy, John F.

21.

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

Chou En Lai

22.

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.

23.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

24.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

27.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

28.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

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.

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

31.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

32.

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

33.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Bolt, Robert

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

42.

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

Burton, Pierre

43.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

44.

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

Wilder, Billy

45.

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

De Delloy

46.

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

47.

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

Swayze, John

48.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

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.

50.

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

Twain, Mark