Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Weil, Simone

Best Quotes about Nations

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

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

Weil, Simone

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

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Buechner, Professor William

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

Chou En Lai

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

De Delloy

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Burke, Edmund

13.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

14.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

15.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

16.

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.

17.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

18.

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

19.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

20.

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

Kennedy, John F.

21.

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

22.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

23.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

24.

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

Wilder, Billy

25.

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

Twain, Mark

26.

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

Hope, Bob

27.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

28.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

29.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

30.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

31.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

32.

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

33.

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

Moliere

34.

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

35.

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

Plato

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

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

Truman, Harry S

38.

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

Bunche, Ralph

39.

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

Sellar, W. C.

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.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

42.

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

43.

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

Custine, Marquis De

44.

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

45.

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

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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.