Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Kubrick, Stanley

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Burton, Pierre

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

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

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

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.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

11.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

Moliere

14.

States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

15.

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

Chou En Lai

16.

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

Bunche, Ralph

17.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

18.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

Wilder, Billy

21.

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

Capone, Al

22.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

27.

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

28.

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

Kennedy, John F.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Wilder, Billy

32.

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

Truman, Harry S

33.

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

34.

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

Twain, Mark

35.

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

36.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

37.

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

Custine, Marquis De

38.

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

Swayze, John

39.

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

Bolt, Robert

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

43.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

44.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

45.

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

Acheson, Dean

46.

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

Buechner, Professor William

47.

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

48.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

49.

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

Hope, Bob

50.

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