Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Wilder, Billy

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Churchill, Winston

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.

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

Sellar, W. C.

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.

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

Twain, Mark

10.

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

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.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

13.

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

Bolt, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

Plato

18.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

19.

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

Acheson, Dean

20.

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

Moliere

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Hope, Bob

25.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

Kennedy, John F.

28.

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

29.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

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.

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

34.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

35.

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

36.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

Buechner, Professor William

38.

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

39.

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

Wilder, Billy

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

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

Wilder, Billy

42.

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

Burton, Pierre

43.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

46.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

47.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

48.

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

49.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

50.

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

Chou En Lai