An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON NATIONS
We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.
Dean Acheson (1893-1971, American statesman, lawyer)
Without a country, I am not a man.
Nawaf Al-Nasir Al-Sabah (Kuwaiti Royalty, grandnephew of the Emir of Kuwait.)
I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.
Malcolm Bradbury (1932-, British author)
In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1977, British economist, critic)
Nations, like men, have their infancy.
Henry Bolingbroke (1678-1751, British politician)
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales!
Robert Bolt (American author)
The French complain of everything, and always.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821, French general, emperor)
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.
Bartlett J. Brebner
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.
Aristide Briand (1862-1932, Novelist born in Brittany, winner of the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize)
The simplest explanation is that it doesn't make sense.
Professor William Buechner
The United Nations is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world.
Ralph Bunche
A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797, British political writer, statesman)
Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797, British political writer, statesman)
England can never be ruined except by a Parliament.
Lord Burleigh
A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.
Pierre Burton
I don't even know what street Canada is on.
Al Capone (1899-1947, American gangster)
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.
Jimmy Carter (1924-, American President (39th))
If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741-1794, French writer, journalist, playwright)
China has no income tax, no unemployment and not a single soldier outside its borders.
En Lai Chou (1898-1976, Chinese communist leader)
Be England what she will, with all her faults she is my country still.
Randolph Churchill (1911-1968, British journalist)
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965, British statesman, Prime Minister)
The maxim of the British people is "Business as usual."
Winston Churchill (1874-1965, British statesman, Prime Minister)
The soil of their native land is dear to all the hearts of mankind.
Marcus T. Cicero (c. 106-43 BC, Roman orator, politician)
I do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, government, blood -- identity in these makes men of one country.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834, British poet, critic, philosopher)
There's always something fishy about the French.
Noel Coward (1899-1973, British writer)
God made the country and man made the town.
William Cowper (1731-1800, British poet)
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.
Javier Perez De Cuellar
Nations have always good reasons for being what they are, and the best of all is that they cannot be otherwise.
Marquis De Custine (1790-1857, French traveler, author)
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.
Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829, British chemist)
The more I saw of foreign countries the more I loved my own.
De Delloy
Great countries are those that produce great people.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)
Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)
There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)
The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
Frederick Douglass (c.1817-1895, American abolitionist, journalist)
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.
John Foster Dulles (1888-1959, American republican secretary of state)
How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty six varieties of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970, French president during World War II)
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.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940, American anarchist)
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.
E. J. Hobsbawm (1917-, British historian)
Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests.
Rolf Hochhuth
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.
Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961, Swedish statesman, Secretary-General of the UN)
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.
Alexander Herzen (1812-1870, Russian journalist, political thinker)
The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.
Bob Hope (1903-2003, American comedian, actor)
The trees in Siberia are miles apart, that is why the dogs are so fast. [About Russia]
Bob Hope (1903-2003, American comedian, actor)
Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
Elbert Hubbard (1859-1915, American author, publisher)
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.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885, French poet, dramatist, novelist)
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978, American Vice President)
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.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.
Douglas William Jerrold (1803-1857, British humorist, playwright)
A nation is the same people living in the same place.
James Joyce (1882-1941, Irish author)
We prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war in the age of mass extermination.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963, American President (35th))
A people always ends by resembling its shadow.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936, British author of Prose, Verse)
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.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)
This organization is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn't created to take you to heaven.
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
I am the state.
Louis XIV (1638-1715, French king from 1643-1715)
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.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527, Italian author, statesman)
The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.
Edouard Manes
The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its manoeuvres may change, but the polar star of its policy, world domination, is a fixed star.
Karl Marx (1818-1883, German political theorist, social philosopher)
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.
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872, Italian patriot, writer)
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.
John Milton (1608-1674, British poet)
Frenchmen have an unlimited capacity for gallantry and indulge it on every occasion.
Jean Baptiste Moliere (1622-1673, French playwright)
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.
Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917-, Irish historian, critic, and statesman)
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
Plato (BC 427?-347?, Greek philosopher)
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
Plato (BC 427?-347?, Greek philosopher)
There is always something new out of Africa.
Pliny The Elder (c.23-79, Roman neophatonist)
It is equality of monotony which makes the strength of the British Isles.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962, American First Lady, columnist, lecturer, humanitarian)
Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778, Swiss political philosopher, educationist, essayist)
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts -- the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
John Ruskin (1819-1900, British critic, social theorist)
The strength and power of a country depend absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.
John Ruskin (1819-1900, British critic, social theorist)
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.
Saki (1870 - 1916, British (Burmese-born) short story author)
Explaining is generally half confessing.
George Savile
National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perverseness and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, German philosopher)
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, German philosopher)
There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616, British poet, playwright, actor)
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
The strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well ordered homes of the people.
Lydia H. Sigourney
Russia has abolished God, but so far God has been tolerant.
John Swayze
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.
Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965, American lawyer, politician)
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745, Anglo-Irish satirist)
You shall be fed with the treasures of the nations and shall glory in their riches. Instead of shame and dishonor, you shall have a double portion of prosperity and everlasting joy.
The Holy Bible (Sacred scriptures of Christians and Judaism) Source: Isaiah 61.6-7
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.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members.
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972, American President (33rd))
France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
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.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
The less you know about a subject, the longer it takes you to explain it.
Author Unknown
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.
Giambattista Vico (1688-1744, Italian philosopher, historian)
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.
Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900, American author)
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil (1910-1943, French philosopher, mystic)
France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.
Billy Wilder (1906-2002, American film director)
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