Motivational Quotes

Nations

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.

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Acheson, Dean

Forster, Edward M.

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

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

Buechner, Professor William

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

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

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

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

10.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

11.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

12.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

13.

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.

14.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

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

17.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

18.

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

Sellar, W. C.

19.

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

20.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

21.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

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

Burke, Edmund

23.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

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

Churchill, Winston

25.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

26.

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

Chou En Lai

27.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

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

29.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

30.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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

Plato

34.

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

Wilder, Billy

35.

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

36.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

37.

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

38.

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

De Delloy

39.

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

Ruskin, John

40.

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

Weil, Simone

41.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

42.

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

Truman, Harry S

43.

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

Kennedy, John F.

44.

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

Wilder, Billy

45.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

47.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

48.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

Hugo, Victor

49.

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

Hope, Bob

50.

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