Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Burton, Pierre

Best Quotes about 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

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.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

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

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Gaulle, Charles De

10.

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

Kennedy, John F.

11.

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

Buechner, Professor William

12.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

13.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

14.

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.

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.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

Jerrold, Douglas William

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

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

25.

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

Twain, Mark

26.

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

27.

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

Churchill, Winston

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.

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

Sellar, W. C.

30.

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

31.

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

Bunche, Ralph

32.

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

Burke, Edmund

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

37.

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

Capone, Al

38.

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

Hope, Bob

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

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.

41.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

42.

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

43.

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

Chou En Lai

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.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

50.

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

Twain, Mark