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

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

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

Sigourney, Lydia

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

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

Buechner, Professor William

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

De Delloy

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

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

Sellar, W. C.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

10.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

11.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

Capone, Al

14.

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

15.

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

Weil, Simone

16.

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

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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.

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

20.

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

Plato

21.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

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

23.

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

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.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

26.

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

Custine, Marquis De

27.

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

28.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

29.

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

Hope, Bob

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

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

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

Truman, Harry S

33.

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

Swayze, John

34.

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.

35.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

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

37.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

38.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

39.

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

40.

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

Bolt, Robert

41.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

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

Wilder, Billy

43.

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

44.

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

Kennedy, John F.

45.

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

46.

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

Burton, Pierre

47.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

48.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

49.

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

50.

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