Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

- Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Best Quotes about Nations

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

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

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

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

Burke, Edmund

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

Hope, Bob

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Bunche, Ralph

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

12.

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

13.

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

Buechner, Professor William

14.

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.

15.

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

Acheson, Dean

16.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Burke, Edmund

17.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

18.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

19.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

20.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

21.

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

22.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

Bolingbroke, Henry

23.

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

Burton, Pierre

24.

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

25.

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

Bolt, Robert

26.

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

27.

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

Plato

28.

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

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

31.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.

Saki

32.

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

33.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

34.

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

35.

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

Weil, Simone

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Capone, Al

39.

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

40.

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

Chou En Lai

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Swayze, John

46.

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

47.

The French complain of everything, and always.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.

Burleigh, Lord

50.

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

Twain, Mark