Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Sellar, W. C.

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

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

Swayze, John

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

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

10.

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

11.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

12.

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.

13.

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

Burke, Edmund

14.

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

15.

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

Burton, Pierre

16.

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

Moliere

17.

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

18.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

19.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Bolt, Robert

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

Wilder, Billy

25.

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.

26.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

27.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

28.

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

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

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.

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

34.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

35.

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

36.

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

De Delloy

37.

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

38.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

39.

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

40.

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

Ruskin, John

41.

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

Wilder, Billy

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Bunche, Ralph

47.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

48.

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

Buechner, Professor William

49.

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

50.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin