Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

Moliere

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

Bolt, Robert

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.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

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

Edinborough, Arnold

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Burton, Pierre

13.

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

14.

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

Swayze, John

15.

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.

16.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

17.

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

Capone, Al

18.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

19.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

23.

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

Churchill, Winston

24.

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

Chou En Lai

25.

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

De Delloy

26.

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

27.

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

28.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

29.

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

Truman, Harry S

30.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Sellar, W. C.

33.

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

Custine, Marquis De

34.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

35.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

37.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

38.

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.

39.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

40.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

41.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

42.

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

Weil, Simone

43.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

44.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Hugo, Victor

48.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

49.

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

50.

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

Twain, Mark