Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Nations

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.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Chou En Lai

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.

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

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

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

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

Kennedy, John F.

10.

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

11.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

12.

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

Sigourney, Lydia

13.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

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

15.

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

Bunche, Ralph

16.

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

17.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

18.

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

19.

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

Acheson, Dean

20.

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

21.

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

Truman, Harry S

22.

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

Moliere

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

26.

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

De Delloy

27.

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

28.

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

Plato

29.

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

Hope, Bob

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Bolt, Robert

35.

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

Sellar, W. C.

36.

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

Twain, Mark

37.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

38.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

40.

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

Wilder, Billy

41.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

45.

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

46.

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

Churchill, Winston

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

49.

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

50.

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

Capone, Al