Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Nations

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

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 simplest explanation is that it doesn't make sense.

Buechner, Professor William

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

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

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

Hammarskjold, Dag

11.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

12.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

13.

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

Weil, Simone

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

18.

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

Sellar, W. C.

19.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

20.

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

Acheson, Dean

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Wilder, Billy

28.

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

29.

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

Bunche, Ralph

30.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

31.

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

Swayze, John

32.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

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

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

41.

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.

42.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

43.

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

44.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin