Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Kennedy, John F.

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Plato

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

Swayze, John

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

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Edinborough, Arnold

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

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

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

Bolt, Robert

14.

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

Twain, Mark

15.

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

16.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

17.

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.

18.

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

De Delloy

19.

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

20.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

21.

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

22.

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

Chou En Lai

23.

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.

24.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

25.

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.

26.

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

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.

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

Acheson, Dean

29.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

30.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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.

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.

34.

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

35.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

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

Weil, Simone

37.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

38.

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

39.

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

Wilder, Billy

40.

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

Hope, Bob

41.

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

Kennedy, John F.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

46.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

48.

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

Ruskin, John

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

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.