Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

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

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

Weil, Simone

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

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

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.

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

13.

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

14.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

Buechner, Professor William

17.

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

18.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Chou En Lai

22.

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

Twain, Mark

23.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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.

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

Kennedy, John F.

26.

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

Bolt, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

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

31.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Truman, Harry S

35.

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

Swayze, John

36.

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

Wilder, Billy

37.

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

De Delloy

38.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

39.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

40.

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

Capone, Al

41.

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

Bunche, Ralph

42.

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

43.

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.

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.

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

46.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

48.

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

49.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

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

Moliere