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 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

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

De Delloy

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

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

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

Bolt, Robert

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.

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

11.

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

Custine, Marquis De

12.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

13.

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

Hope, Bob

14.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

15.

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

Wilder, Billy

16.

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.

17.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

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

Burton, Pierre

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Kennedy, John F.

23.

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

Capone, Al

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

27.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

28.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

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

Ruskin, John

30.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

31.

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

32.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

33.

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

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.

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

Chou En Lai

36.

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

Wilder, Billy

37.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

38.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

39.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

40.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

Moliere

44.

Hammarskjold, Dag

45.

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

Weil, Simone