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

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

Churchill, Winston

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

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

Burton, Pierre

10.

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

Bolt, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

13.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

Chou En Lai

17.

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

Truman, Harry S

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

20.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

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.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

23.

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

24.

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

De Delloy

25.

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

26.

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

Sellar, W. C.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

30.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

31.

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

32.

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

Moliere

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Plato

36.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

Swayze, John

38.

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

Hope, Bob

39.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

40.

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.

41.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

42.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

47.

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

48.

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

49.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

50.

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

Acheson, Dean