Top 72 National Character Quotes
#1. As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
Alexis De Tocqueville
#2. But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.
Hunter S. Thompson
#3. I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.
Herbert Hoover
#4. Queen Victoria did not regard art, letters, or music as in any way springing from national character: they were something quite apart, elegant decorations resembling a scarf or a bracelet, and in no way expressive of the soul of the country.
E.F. Benson
#5. A union of the States is a union of the men composing them, from whence a national character result to the whole,
Rufus King
#6. Alexander Hamilton reflected as early as the middle of the Revolutionary War that rallying at the last minute was part of the national character of his countrymen.
John Ferling
#7. Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character.
J. William Fulbright
#8. Forms of government are forged mainly in the fire of practice, not in the vacuum of theory. They respond to national character and to national realities.
George F. Kennan
#9. No government can be strong and flourishing while the national character is weak and degraded. A government must flourish and decay with its subjects; and, when a prince makes a law or performs an action which has a tendency to injure the character or prosperity of the nation, he injures himself.
Benjamin Robbins Curtis
#10. Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success; and it is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created.
Benjamin Disraeli
#12. Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS ...
Thomas Paine
#13. America has always welcomed anyone willing to assimilate to its national character. But radical Islam rejects assimilation and is bent on the conquest of our national character.
Nancy Pearcey
#14. From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.
Bill Frist
#15. From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.
Bill Frist
#16. We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all maters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.
George Washington
#17. A national festival is an occasion to refine and rebuild the national character.
Narendra Modi
#18. Nothing short of self-respect and that justice which is essential to a national character ought to involve us in war.
George Washington
#19. Of course, no religious test for the presidency - every faith adds to our national character.
Benjamin Carson
#20. I have always believed that national character ... depends more on the female part of society than is generally imagined. Precepts from the lips of a beloved mother ... sink deep in the heart, and make an impression which is seldom entirely effaced.
John Marshall
#21. The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#22. The love for our native land strengthens our individual and national character.
Alexander Hamilton
#23. Economic power is not the same as strength of national character. Our country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit.
Richard M. Nixon
#24. I don't really like discussions about a supposed Russian national character.
Garry Kasparov
#25. National character cannot be built by law. It is the sum of the moral fiber of its individuals.
Herbert Hoover
#26. He who loses his people and his national character loses both the faith of his fathers and God.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#27. By the way, whenever an Englishman would cry 'All right!' an American cries 'Go ahead!' which is somewhat expressive of the national character of the two countries.
Charles Dickens
#28. D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." Women
Piper Kerman
#29. 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#30. When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
Andrew O'Hagan
#31. Our cultural diversity has most certainly shaped our national character.
Julie Bishop
#32. The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon 's immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. There must be a renewal of the spirit of our forefathers, an
appreciation of the American way of life, a strengthening of muscle and sinew and the character of the nation. America needs guts as well as guns.
National character is the core of national defense.
Ezra Taft Benson
#34. Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.
Ibrahim Babangida
#35. Those concerns of a national character-such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties-must, of course, be handled on the national level.
Ronald Reagan
#36. The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.
Peter Ackroyd
#37. Was there really something to the obsolete idea of a national character? Some countries just changed tyrants, without changing anything else.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#38. Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.
James Madison
#39. Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect ...
Elizabeth Hardwick
#40. But what must be the character of that policy, which aims at national prosperity through the impoverishment of a large proportion of the home producers, with a view to supply foreigners at a cheaper rate, and give them all the benifet of the national privation and self denial?
Jean-Baptiste Say
#41. He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#42. The media already attempts to assassinate my character in Scotland when I'm there, so my position is much more effective if I'm outside Scotland and am part of the voice of what the Scottish National Party is about.
Sean Connery
#43. Science, almost from its beginnings, has been truly international in character. National prejudices disappear completely in the scientist's search for truth.
Irving Langmuir
#44. It is not possible to conceive a democratic Guatemala, free and independent, without the indigenous identity shaping its character into all aspects of national existence.
Rigoberta Menchu
#45. I - and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do - have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait of character, and I cannot help it.
Douglas Hyde
#46. Internationalism on the other hand admits that spiritual achievements have their roots deep in national life; from this national consciousness art and literature derive their character and strength and on it even many of the humanistic sciences are firmly based.
Christian Lous Lange
#47. To know a people's character, we must see it at its homes, and look chiefly to the humbler abodes where that portion of the people dwells which makes the broad basis of the national prosperity.
Lajos Kossuth
#48. I'm happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain. He's a Spanish national hero. I'd rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#49. It is amazing to me that we allow so many people with so little proven character to set our national policy on issues that will ultimately be paid for by the rest of us.
Larry Burkett
#50. Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually have to turn up to their own lives at all.
A.A. Gill
#51. The government has, in all countries, a vast influence, in determining the character of the national consumption; not only because it absolutely directs the consumption of the state itself, but because a great proportion of the consumption of individuals is gained by its will and example.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#52. There is no legislation
I care not what it is
tariff, railroads, corporations, or of a general political character, that all equals in importance the putting of our banking and currency system on the sound basis proposed in the National Monetary Commission plan.
William Howard Taft
#53. Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
E. M. Forster
#54. Even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same causes, must follow the same main direction, and - sooner or later - must have the same effects.
Ellen Key
#55. There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes.
Evan Parker
#56. Your pride for your country should not come after your country becomes great; your country becomes great because of your pride in it.
Idowu Koyenikan
#57. Declaring the San Gabriel Mountains a national monument will make this natural wonder more accessible. It will welcome people from all walks of life and maintain the mountains' wild character at the same time.
Frances Beinecke
#58. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.
Ian Fleming
#59. In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
P. J. O'Rourke
#60. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
John Carroll
#61. When expressing a regular character literal, you simply use single quotes: 'This is a regular character string literal'. When expressing a Unicode character literal, you need to specify the character N (for National) as a prefix: N'This is a Unicode character string literal'.
Itzik Ben-Gan
#62. It was not, as some suggest, Calvinism that made Scots hard: it was Scottish character that made Calvinism, already congenial to the national spirit, even more rock-ribbed than its Genevan counterpart.
James G. Leyburn
#63. The tempestuous stretch of river below that dam, however, represents something no less central to the national ethos: the fact that another aspect of our character as a people derives from an extended encounter with wilderness.
Kevin Fedarko
#64. Honestly, happy. This happened for a reason. By having to answer that question in front of a national audience, God was testing my character and faith. I'm glad I stayed true to myself.
Carrie Prejean
#65. The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.
James Madison
#66. Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers.
Andrew Nikiforuk
#67. A nation's greatness is measured not just by its gross national product or military power, but by the strength of its devotion to the principles and values that bind its people and define their character.
Ronald Reagan
#68. You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
John Ruskin
#69. We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.
John Adams
#70. In the 1960s, The National Education Association changed its character. The NEA changed into a union. And from that point on you can see deterioration in the quality of schooling in the United States.
Milton Friedman
#71. The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character.
Theodor Mommsen
#72. He was the strangest of all our national sports idols. But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a ballplayer. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.
Jimmy Cannon
