Top 100 Nation State Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I just think it is entirely normal for the United Kingdom to be an independent nation state.
Michael Gove
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
Walt Whitman
#25. It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of the supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.
James C. Scott
#26. They knew by instinct rather than by insight that this new expansion movement, in which "patriotism . . . is best expressed in money-making" (Huebbe-Schleiden) and the national flag is a "commercial asset" (Rhodes), could only destroy the political body of the nation-state.
Hannah Arendt
#27. As the nation-state has monopolized habeas corpus ... on balance we have far more people in prison, federal and state, than ever.
Anthony Gregory
#28. We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.
Orhan Pamuk
#29. Nonetheless, we continue to be obsessed with finding or inventing a European nation which, as in the nation state, guarantees homogeneity and thus an appropriate form of democracy and centralized government.
Ulrich Beck
#30. In my book, the Arab Awakening, I talk about the fact that we have to move from this. All the contemporary ideologies of political Islam have been based on the nation state. The nation state is very problematic but I'm not sure if we have an alternative political model.
Tariq Ramadan
#31. Nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#32. The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.
Neal Stephenson
#33. There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past,
William J. Clinton
#34. What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm ... Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty.
Jacques Ellul
#35. In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
#36. Reza implemented an impressive number of reforms that were designed to turn the cracked empire he had inherited into a purposeful nation state. But he ended up, like so many of his fellow dictators, alone in his citadel. And much of the goods he did was nullified by the way he did it.
Christopher De Bellaigue
#37. Those who claim France as a nation-state is obsolete are wrong.
Max Gallo
#38. After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century.
Pankaj Mishra
#39. You know, we're a victim of our own success," the former senator said quietly. "We've managed to handle every nation-state that ever crossed us, but these invisible bastards who work for their vision of God are harder to identify and track.
Tom Clancy
#40. Cyber will be part of any future conflict
whether it's a nation state or terrorism,
Cofer Black
#41. The nation-state is becoming less and less competent to perform its international political tasks ... These are some of the reasons pressing us to lead vigorously toward the true building of a new world order.
Nelson Rockefeller
#42. To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one's needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.
Bill Mollison
#43. The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.
Cornel West
#44. Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man's universal vision ... The nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty ... More intensive efforts to shape a new world monetary structure will have to be undertaken.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#45. The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state.
John Perry Barlow
#46. One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown.
Marcy Kaptur
#47. The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.
Niall Ferguson
#48. You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.
Vaclav Klaus
#49. Name your nation-state, or tribe or party - you have to rationalize what you're doing. You have to go to sleep at night. Does Dick Cheney sleep at night? Does he sleep like a baby?
Martin Donovan
#50. The elites have become international, and they've ceased to have a primary loyalty to the nation-state.
Jeff Sessions
#51. One of the striking features of the form of globalisation that has now been established is that it is based on the premise that goods and even capital should be free to roam but labour must remain imprisoned within the nation state.
Roberto Unger
#52. Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
George Will
#53. The competitive nation-state system, with all its capacity for good and evil, is spreading in the Third World and is transforming that world.
Robert Gilpin
#54. Both peoples, both nations, deserve a nation-state of their own. Palestinians, if they wish so, will go to the Palestinian state; Jews, if they so wish, can go to the Jewish state. And we'll have to have security and demilitarization agreements between us.
Benjamin Netanyahu
#55. Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.
Matt Ridley
#56. No Muslim country has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state; the country's westernised elite brutally imposed secularism, among other things, on its devout population of peasants.
Pankaj Mishra
#57. Al Qaeda is not a nation-state and it has not signed the Geneva Conventions. It shows no desire to obey the laws of war; if anything it directly violates them by disguising themselves as civilians and attacking purely civilian targets to cause massive casualties.
John Yoo
#58. China is, indeed, in so many ways, not like the West. It is not even primarily a nation state but a civilisation state. Whereas the West has primarily been shaped by its experience of nation, China has been moulded by its sense of civilisation.
Martin Jacques
#59. Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.
Stanley Wolpert
#61. A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
Edward Abbey
#62. It was [the concept of] nationalism that Indonesia was established on. Not the Javanese, not the Sumatran, not the Bornean, Sulawesi, Bali or others, but the Indonesian, that together became the foundation of one nationale staat (nation-state).
Sukarno
#63. Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top.
Daniel Berrigan
#64. The Ancient Egyptians were not fools, Carter. They built the pyramids. They created the first great nation state. Their civilization lasted thousands of years."
"Yeah," I said. "And now they're gone.
Rick Riordan
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.
Voltaire
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Our goal is to make Maine the healthiest state in the nation and reduce our overall health care costs.
John Baldacci
#89. Your ideas about possession must increase until you get to a state of full possession of the land, city and nation
Sunday Adelaja
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The State dominates the Nation because it alone represents it.
Adolf Hitler
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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