Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

Weil, Simone

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

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

De Delloy

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

Truman, Harry S

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

10.

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

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

Hope, Bob

13.

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

Swayze, John

14.

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

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

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

17.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

18.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

19.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

20.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

21.

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

Chou En Lai

22.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

23.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

24.

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.

25.

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

Bolt, Robert

26.

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

27.

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

Kennedy, John F.

28.

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

Plato

29.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

30.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

31.

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

32.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

36.

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

Churchill, Winston

37.

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

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Acheson, Dean

44.

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

45.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

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.

48.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

49.

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

50.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard