Top 100 Nation State Quotes
#1. Personally I have never been able to understand why the head of a big business, whether it be the Nation, the State or the Army, or Navy should not desire to have very strong and positive people under him.
Theodore Roosevelt
#2. The nation state is a relatively modern idea, and I don't think we're getting a lot out of it except for flags and World Cups.
Russell Brand
#3. In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War.
Alexander Hamilton
#4. Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#5. The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.
Mitt Romney
#6. The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.
Voltaire
#7. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.
Michael Hastings
#8. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.
Camille Paglia
#9. By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one-ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a State, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle?
Abraham Lincoln
#10. More and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures.
Theodore Roosevelt
#11. I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.
Lech Walesa
#12. Why center your focus on making "Liberia" a Christian (nation) State? The focus should be, on, making "Liberia" a progressive state. Not a Christian one. Progressivism in "Liberia" should be the path vital to improving the human condition.
Henry Johnson Jr
#13. Each State has its own health insurance mandates, and some of them are good, but there are about 1,800 of them all across the Nation, including provisions for acupuncturists, massage therapists, and hair replacements.
Timothy Murphy
#14. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.
Randolph Bourne
#15. Externally China desires independence, internally she seeks to maintain her existence as a nation; China therefore strives to loose the bonds that bind her people, and to complete the establishment of a new State.
Chiang Kai-shek
#16. It has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.
Chris Hedges
#17. For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.
Pankaj Mishra
#18. We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends
the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.
Friedrich Engels
#19. Even though New York is the safest big city in the nation, there are still far too many illegal guns on our streets. Nearly all of them arrive from out of state - and most are sold by a small group of rogue gun dealers who refuse to obey federal laws.
Michael Bloomberg
#20. The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#21. A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson
#22. Can you think of anything that can get better if we crowd more people into our cities, our towns, into our state our nation or on this earth?
Albert Allen Bartlett
#23. The severity of punishments ought to be relative to the state of the nation itself. Stronger and more easily felt impressions have to be made on a people only just out of the savage state. A lightning strike is needed to stop a fierce lion who is provoked by a gunshot.
Cesare Beccaria
#24. Many women are now holding posts of grave responsibility in city and country and state and nation, and their number must be greatly increased.
Herbert Hoover
#25. Yet, Puerto Rico's economic convergence and political integration with the rest of the nation is in a state of arrest - even though the island has been within the national borders, political system and customs territory of the U.S. for a century.
Dick Thornburgh
#26. Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore rescinded the state's European Heritage Month proclamation for fear it would sound racist. It's too bad. Thus ends a month of celebrating the 400-year progression of our nation's British culture from wood to steel to graphite shafts.
Argus Hamilton
#27. India is a confused nation today. It does not understand its nature, which seems to be a hotchpotch of the masculine and feminine way. But if you force me to choose, then I would state that, at this point in time, we're a feminine culture in decline.
Amish Tripathi
#28. We see nation-states collapsing all around us: Libya, Syria, Iraq. We do not want another failed state in our neighborhood, which would rapidly turn into a stronghold for terrorists, as we have seen in Gaza. We do not want tunnels to suburbs of Tel Aviv or missiles pointed at Jerusalem.
Ayelet Shaked
#29. I just think it is entirely normal for the United Kingdom to be an independent nation state.
Michael Gove
#30. Our goal is to make Maine the healthiest state in the nation and reduce our overall health care costs.
John Baldacci
#31. Your ideas about possession must increase until you get to a state of full possession of the land, city and nation
Sunday Adelaja
#32. If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation.
Lincoln Steffens
#33. We live in a diverse nation, but it isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.
Timothy Noah
#34. Fear and anger are a threat to justice. They can infect a community, a state, or a nation, and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous.
Bryan Stevenson
#35. I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness for your sins from God, but not from the Minister of Justice. There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Trudeau
#36. The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations.
David Warren
#37. This year, we must address the Colorado Paradox. We have more college degrees per capita than any state. Yet we lag the nation in the percentage of students who go on to higher education.
Bill Owens
#38. The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.
Ernest Gellner
#39. The State dominates the Nation because it alone represents it.
Adolf Hitler
#40. How can you contribute towards building the Indian society and the Indian nation? No better way than to upgrade the quality of young people in school, particularly the schools which are run by the state government in the villages.
Azim Premji
#41. Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
David Novak
#42. If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code
Woodrow Wilson
#43. Experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a state depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men; for the nation is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal, improvement.
Samuel Smiles
#44. In my heart, there was joy mixed with sadness: joy that the nations atlast acknowledged that we are a nation with a state, and sadness that we lost half of the country, Judea and Samaria, and , in addition, that we [would] have[in our state] 400,000 [Palestinian] Arabs.
David
#45. In a way I am saying the nation-state doesn't exist, borders don't exist, you can try going anywhere. It is a kind of pre-Internet consensus I always had in me.
Aleksandra Mir
#46. Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Trudeau
#47. Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class.
Jon Meacham
#48. The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Trudeau
#49. The Center for American Progress rates Maryland as the best state in the nation for women. I couldn't agree more.
Martin O'Malley
#50. We need to be much more far thinking in this new 21st century era of - of nation state failures and conflict. It's not just about getting rid of a single dictator. It is about understanding the secondary and third consequences that fall next.
Martin O'Malley
#51. The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
Rebecca Solnit
#52. Why don't we just sit and stare and do nothing? Nothing at all for a while I like the way you smile I could be your state and I could be your nation It doesn't get better than home, now does it?
Zooey Deschanel
#53. In the state of society in which we now find ourselves, it is difficult to imagine a nation which lived solely on bread and vegetables.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
#54. In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#55. There is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason - because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold.
Noam Chomsky
#56. I think most Coloradans would agree that our state is the most beautiful in the nation, and the water flowing through our borders is its life blood.
Wayne Allard
#57. Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.
Warren Ellis
#58. They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt.
Denis Kearney
#59. Whether to the nation or to the state, no service can be or ever will be rendered by a more able or a more faithful public servant.
John Quincy Adams
#60. The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us who hold to the original traditions of our nation. To change these traditions by changing our traditional attitude toward public education would be harmful, I think, to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#61. While researching for his talk, Conners had noticed that North Carolina, his adopted home state, owned the dubious distinction of having the nation's highest rate of kids diagnosed with ADHD.
Alan Schwarz
#62. We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.
Tom Brokaw
#63. A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#64. Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.
Robert Reich
#65. I like the British public. There is something in this country called tall poppy syndrome. You're good but you're not that good, pal, OK? The natural state of our nation is slightly miserable, and probably the healthier for it. In America you don't get a key down the side of your Bentley ...
Steve Coogan
#66. The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state.
Abdal Hakim Murad
#67. Few of the university's sons had been distinguished in the nation's life--there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one's State. Nothing beyond mattered very much.
Thomas Wolfe
#68. Since the peace treaties
of 1919 and 1920, the refugees and
the stateless have attached themselves
like a curse to all the newly
established states on earth which
were created in the image of the
nation-state.
Hannah Arendt
#69. Maybe individual people seem irrational because they aren't really individuals! Each one of us is a little nation-state, doing our best to settle disputes and broker compromises between the squabbling voices that drive us.
Jordan Ellenberg
#70. All talk on Islamic States is just an empty dream. No man in his right sense would accept a nation which bases its political administration on religion, and in a country like Malaysia with its multiracial and multireligious people, there is no room for an Islamic State.
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#71. Evil is like a pathogen that enters a system, be it an individual, nation-state, or world-system, and exploits that system, knocking it off balance.
Paul Levy
#72. In an era that exalts individual autonomy above all other values, the state as a practical matter has long since forfeited its authority to command citizens to defend the nation.
Andrew J. Bacevich
#73. Texas really is the greatest state in the greatest nation. Texans - and women all over the country - deserve leaders that care, that listen, and that work to protect their interests.
Wendy Davis
#74. I see no reason to use offensive tools unless you're defending the country or in a state of war, or you want to achieve some really important thing for the good of the nation and others.
Keith B. Alexander
#75. Britain's unique success as an industrialised nation-state prompted strong imitative endeavours not only across Europe, but also in Asia. Now many people, who were once humiliated into a sense of nationality by British rule, loom larger than their former masters.
Pankaj Mishra
#76. The constitution ought to specifically state that every nation is left entirely independent and supreme in its internal affairs, such as regulating emigration and all other similar matters.
George William Norris
#77. The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.
Grace Lee Boggs
#78. The dream of socialists, the Maximum Programme, has always been to eliminate the private property, the family and the nation state. With the private property they have not succeeded, but they continue on the path of destruction of the family and the nation.
Vladimir Bukovsky
#79. If you have an Internet-connected system, there's no wall currently that you can build that's high enough or deep enough to keep a dedicated nation-state or even a sophisticated criminal group out of your system.
John Carlin
#80. The Nation State as such is totally a construction: what we feel for it in terms of habits, traditions, countryside or nature could exist without the notion of Nation.
Janne Teller
#81. Peace must begin within self before there can come action or self application in a way to bring peace-even in thine own household, in thine own vicinity, in thine own state or nation.
Edgar Cayce
#82. But the threat posed by the radical Islamists represents an unusual conflict, unlike any experienced by our nation before: we face an enemy that is not a state.
Paul Weyrich
#83. In reality, Afghanistan has functioned as a nation-state for more than two centuries, and its army and bureaucracy reach back to the 19th century.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
#84. From Olsen's Nation: "Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran's nuclear program now stands as one. Standing as one, the world now sincerely regrets Iran's nuclear program." - President Bodvar Olsen, fifth State of the Union address
Randy Quarles
#85. As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
Milton Friedman
#86. Since 2006, we have surpassed Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and California in oil production to become the second largest oil-producing state in the nation, trailing only Texas. In 2012, North Dakota produced more than 245 million barrels of oil and provided nearly 11 percent of all U.S. output.
John Hoeven
#87. A state in India will have more traders than perhaps a European nation. Trade is a great way to integrate people.
Narendra Modi
#88. There is nothing new in state interventionism. It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself. Always, when it permeates the body politic, it kills the nation.
Spruille Braden
#89. The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.
Emma Goldman
#90. In a democracy, dynasty politics is wrong. We need to free the state and nation from it.
Narendra Modi
#91. I want to say thank you to the great state of Indiana and all the fans ... Pacers Nation, Blue and Gold, thank you guys so much.
Reggie Miller
#93. Washington, D.C., could learn a few budget lessons from Florida. The contrast between our state and the nation's capital is remarkable.
Rick Scott
#94. We are a religious nation because we do not have a state religion, because the government guarantees freedom of religion but has no role in religion, because not only do we tolerate our religious differences, we celebrate them.
Geraldine Ferraro
#95. A single nation that has succeeded in lowering the intelligence, the morality, the quality of the human race almost throughout the globe is a phenomenon never before experienced since the beginning of time. I accuse the United States of being in a constant state of crime against humanity.
Henry De Montherlant
#96. As long as Iran's aggressive policies continue, it's going to be bad for the region. Iran has to decide whether it wants a revolution or a nation-state.
Adel Al-Jubeir
#97. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.
John Steinbeck
#98. I would like that no citizen of the state feels alone and helpless. The entire nation is with them.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
#99. I think it's already apparent that a good part of this Nation understands - if only instinctively - that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous.
Mario Cuomo
#100. The Negro has been here in America since 1619, a total of 344 years. He is not going anywhere else; this country is his home. He wants to do his part to help make his city, state, and nation a better place for everyone, regardless of color and race.
Medgar Evers
