Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Burke, Edmund

Best Quotes about Nations

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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

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

Truman, Harry S

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

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

Burton, Pierre

10.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Bolt, Robert

15.

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

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

18.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

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

Wilder, Billy

25.

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

Chou En Lai

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

30.

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

31.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

32.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

33.

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

Weil, Simone

34.

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.

35.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

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.

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.

38.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

39.

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

40.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

42.

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

43.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Custine, Marquis De

45.

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

46.

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

Burke, Edmund

47.

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.

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Capone, Al