Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Nations

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.

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.

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

Swayze, John

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

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Ruskin, John

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

10.

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

Bunche, Ralph

11.

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

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

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

Wilder, Billy

14.

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

Twain, Mark

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

22.

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

Truman, Harry S

23.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

24.

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

Buechner, Professor William

25.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

26.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

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

Capone, Al

29.

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

Moliere

30.

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

31.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

32.

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

Burke, Edmund

33.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

34.

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

Acheson, Dean

35.

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

Wilder, Billy

36.

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

37.

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

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Burton, Pierre

44.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

48.

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

Plato

49.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

50.

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