Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

Twain, Mark

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

Plato

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

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

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

Ruskin, John

10.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

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

Hope, Bob

12.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

13.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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

Buechner, Professor William

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Churchill, Winston

18.

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.

19.

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

Burton, Pierre

20.

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

21.

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

Kennedy, John F.

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

25.

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

Capone, Al

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

28.

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

Wilder, Billy

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Custine, Marquis De

37.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

38.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

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

Moliere

40.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Sellar, W. C.

44.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

45.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki