Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Custine, Marquis De

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Burton, Pierre

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

Burke, Edmund

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

Custine, Marquis De

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

De Delloy

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

Hope, Bob

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.

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

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

10.

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

11.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

12.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

21.

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

Capone, Al

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

27.

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

28.

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

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

Wilder, Billy

30.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

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

Truman, Harry S

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Chou En Lai

41.

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

42.

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

Swayze, John

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.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Kipling, Rudyard

45.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

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

Sellar, W. C.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry