Motivational Quotes

Nations

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.

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Sellar, W. C.

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

Acheson, Dean

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

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

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.

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

Buechner, Professor William

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

10.

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

Plato

11.

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

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.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

14.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Custine, Marquis De

21.

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

22.

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

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

25.

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

26.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

27.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

28.

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

Bolt, Robert

29.

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

Hope, Bob

30.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

31.

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

32.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

33.

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

Burke, Edmund

34.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

35.

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

Truman, Harry S

36.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

37.

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

38.

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

Moliere

39.

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

Weil, Simone

40.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

42.

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

De Delloy

43.

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.

44.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

46.

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

Burton, Pierre

47.

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

48.

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

Bunche, Ralph

49.

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

50.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki