Motivational Quotes

Nations

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

- Kipling, Rudyard

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

Burton, Pierre

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

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

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

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

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

Kennedy, John F.

10.

France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.

Wilder, Billy

11.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

12.

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

Weil, Simone

13.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

17.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

18.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

23.

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

24.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

25.

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

Swayze, John

26.

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

27.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

28.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

29.

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

30.

A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.

Burke, Edmund

31.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

Custine, Marquis De

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

39.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

40.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

41.

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

Moliere

42.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

43.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

Buechner, Professor William

45.

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

Wilder, Billy

46.

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

47.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

48.

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

49.

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

Capone, Al

50.

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