Motivational Quotes

Nations

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.

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

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

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

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

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

Ruskin, John

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

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

Hope, Bob

10.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

11.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

12.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

13.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

14.

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

15.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

16.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

21.

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

Chou En Lai

22.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

23.

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

Bunche, Ralph

24.

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.

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.

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

Capone, Al

27.

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

28.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

29.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

30.

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

Buechner, Professor William

31.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

32.

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

Swayze, John

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Burton, Pierre

40.

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

Sellar, W. C.

41.

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

Burke, Edmund

42.

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

43.

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

Truman, Harry S

44.

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

45.

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

Kennedy, John F.

46.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

47.

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

Moliere

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin