Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Ruskin, John

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

De Delloy

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

Truman, Harry S

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Sellar, W. C.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

10.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

Wilder, Billy

12.

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

Kennedy, John F.

13.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

14.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

15.

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

16.

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

Moliere

17.

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

Swayze, John

18.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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 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

21.

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

Burke, Edmund

22.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

23.

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

24.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

25.

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

26.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

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

29.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

30.

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.

31.

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.

32.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

33.

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

Bolt, Robert

34.

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.

35.

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

Chou En Lai

36.

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

37.

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

Acheson, Dean

38.

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

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

45.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

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

47.

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

Plato

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Bunche, Ralph