Motivational Quotes

Nations

Great countries are those that produce great people.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Buechner, Professor William

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

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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.

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

Capone, Al

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

10.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

11.

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

12.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

13.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

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

Custine, Marquis De

15.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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

17.

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

Sellar, W. C.

18.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

19.

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

20.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

21.

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

22.

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

Wilder, Billy

23.

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

24.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

25.

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

Chou En Lai

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

29.

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

30.

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

Ruskin, John

31.

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

Moliere

32.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

33.

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

Burke, Edmund

34.

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

35.

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

Kennedy, John F.

36.

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

Plato

37.

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

Acheson, Dean

38.

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

39.

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

40.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

41.

The more I saw of foreign countries the more I loved my own.

De Delloy

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

48.

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

Weil, Simone

49.

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

Churchill, Winston

50.

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