Motivational Quotes

Nations

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

Best Quotes about Nations

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

Sigourney, Lydia

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

Burton, Pierre

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Wilder, Billy

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

Plato

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

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

Without a country, I am not a man.

Al-Sabah, Nawaf Al-Nasir

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

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.

11.

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.

12.

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

Sellar, W. C.

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

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

17.

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

Bolt, Robert

18.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

19.

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

Bradbury, Malcolm

20.

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

Chou En Lai

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Jerrold, Douglas William

25.

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

Custine, Marquis De

26.

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

Moliere

27.

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

Twain, Mark

28.

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

Edinborough, Arnold

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

De Delloy

35.

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

Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot

36.

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

Kubrick, Stanley

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.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

Wilder, Billy

40.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

Hope, Bob

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Churchill, Winston

44.

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.

45.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Coward, Noel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Goldman, Emma

49.

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

50.

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

Hope, Bob