Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

Chou En Lai

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Bolt, Robert

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Plato

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

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

10.

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

Wilder, Billy

11.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

12.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

13.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Hammarskjold, Dag

19.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

20.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

21.

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

Capone, Al

22.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

23.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

24.

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

25.

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

Bunche, Ralph

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

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

28.

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

Burton, Pierre

29.

The strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well ordered homes of the people.

Sigourney, Lydia

30.

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

Wilder, Billy

31.

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.

32.

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

Hope, Bob

33.

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

Custine, Marquis De

34.

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

35.

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

Ruskin, John

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

De Delloy

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.

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

41.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

42.

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

43.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Sellar, W. C.

45.

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

46.

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

Weil, Simone

47.

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

48.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

49.

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

Churchill, Winston

50.

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