Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

Burton, Pierre

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

Twain, Mark

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

Ruskin, John

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.

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

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

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

Moliere

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.

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

Acheson, Dean

11.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

Custine, Marquis De

14.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Buechner, Professor William

19.

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

20.

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

Kennedy, John F.

21.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

22.

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

De Delloy

23.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

24.

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

Bunche, Ralph

25.

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

26.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

27.

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

Bolt, Robert

28.

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

29.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

30.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

31.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

32.

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

33.

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

Hope, Bob

34.

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

35.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Sellar, W. C.

41.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

42.

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

Churchill, Winston

43.

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

Plato

44.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

45.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

46.

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

47.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

48.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

49.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

50.

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