Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

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

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

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

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

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

Acheson, Dean

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

10.

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

Capone, Al

11.

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

Weil, Simone

12.

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

13.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

14.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

15.

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

Wilder, Billy

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

20.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Plato

25.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

26.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

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.

31.

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

Wilder, Billy

32.

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

Hochhuth, Rolf

33.

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

Buechner, Professor William

34.

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

Hope, Bob

35.

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

Bunche, Ralph

36.

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

Ruskin, John

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.

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

Truman, Harry S

40.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

41.

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

42.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

43.

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

Swayze, John

44.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

45.

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