Top 100 Quotes About Great Nations
#1. The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick
#2. Surely, God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement in relations between the two great nations on earth.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#3. C" is for colonies
Rightly we boast
that of all the great nations
Great Britain has most!
Mrs. Ernest Ames
#4. We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.
Damian Woetzel
#5. Keeping small nations enslaved because of the deals between the great nations or because of any pragmatic considerations that might have been there are totally unacceptable.
Mikheil Saakashvili
#6. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?
Dick Cavett
#8. Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#9. Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they're great.
Peggy Noonan
#10. The truth therefore is that great nations become great not because of their amount of wealth an Great nations become great thanks to their wealth of truth, honesty and other virtues the natural resources.
Sunday Adelaja
#11. The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.
Gregory Benford
#12. I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.
Edward Abbey
#13. Every virile people has established colonial power. All great nations in the fullness of their strength have desired to set their mark upon barbarian lands and those who fail to participate in this great rivalry will play a pitiable role in time to come.
Heinrich Von Treitschke
#14. Great nations don't have to remind others of their greatness. They merely have to be great.
Kathleen Parker
#15. It is in times of difficulty that great nations like great men display the whole energy of their character and become an object of admiration to posterity.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#16. Nations, great nations have limitations. All nations have limitations. Even great powers have limitations.
Chuck Hagel
#17. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
Robert H. Jackson
#19. Peking welcomed me with tremendous parades and gun salutes. The people with me are proud of me, proud that our downtrodden country has taken its place among the great nations. And now, people of America, I ask you, why didn't Eisenhower accord me the same respect?
Sukarno
#20. Great nations do not succumb through lost wars, but rather through racial decay and the destruction of their internal order.
Adolf Hitler
#21. By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.
Gore Vidal
#22. An array of colorful camps dotted the river banks, like a Garrison of army on a peace keeping mission. A mini India; many great nations; different people living in the same place, an inversion of the notion of nation.
Aporva Kala
#24. The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,
The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,
Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,
Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored;
Great nations blossom above,
A slave bows down to a slave.
William Butler Yeats
#25. It is true, that a Law of Contract based on causae will always be an arbitrary and inelastic law; but it is a kind of law with which some great nations are satisfied at the present day.
Edward Jenks
#26. 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
#27. The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created
Walter Bagehot
#28. If we fail to solve this moral and spiritual crisis we may be doomed like the great nations of the past.
Billy Graham
#29. I dream of an India that is prosperous, strong and caring. An India, that regains a place of honour in the comity of great nations.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
#30. Boy did not see why two great nations such as England and Germany should go to war over a half-barbaric wasteland such as Poland.
Ken Follett
#31. Great nations are built by great people, not just successful people
Fela Durotoye
#32. It was leadership here at home that gave us strong American influence abroad, and the collapse of imperial Communism. Great nations have responsibilities to lead, and we should always be cautious of those who would lower our profile, because they might just wind up lowering our flag.
Ronald Reagan
#33. Canada is destined to be one of the great nations of the world and Canadian women must be ready for citizenship.
Nellie L. McClung
#34. Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.
Adam Smith
#35. Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle.
Hillary Clinton
#36. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
Sigmund Freud
#37. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
Ernst Junger
#38. While I recognize the great value and importance of prescription drugs and strongly support a continued U.S. focus on pharmaceutical research and development, our nation's seniors cannot be asked to subsidize the drug costs of other wealthy industrialized nations any longer.
Michael K. Simpson
#39. The great free nations of the world must take control of our monetary problems if these problems are not to take control of us.
John F. Kennedy
#40. Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.
Conor Cruise O'Brien
#41. Nations not possessing great power can indulge in the luxury of
criticism of others; those possessing it have the responsibility of
decision. Faced with a clear challenge, the decision not to use
one's power must be as deliberate as the decision to use it. The con
Richard M. Nixon
#42. It's not God's great love that falls short in accomplishing redemption of nations
Sunday Adelaja
#43. As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein
#44. Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#45. The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.
John Keegan
#46. The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#47. Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies ... the key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada, to the Great Lakes, and to all the Indian Nations.
Joseph J. Ellis
#48. In this nation, the greatest of all nations, there are no second-class families. That is our great American conviction.
Benjamin Todd Jealous
#49. Those nations have a very great responsibility at this juncture of the world's affairs, for by throwing their joint weight into the scales of history on the right side, they may tip the balance decisively in favour of peace.
Arthur Henderson
#50. Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Father of the Republic, made it his great aim in his revolutionary leadership to secure freedom and equality of status for China among the nations of the world.
Chiang Kai-shek
#51. Change is the law of life and of relations between nations. When two great peoples such as ours, energetic and optimistic, live side by side in all the diversity that freedom offers, change is rapid and brings in its wake problems, sometimes frictions.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#52. The great works belong to no one nation, no one cultural tradition even. They are universal.
George Brandis
#53. One of the great disappointments of our time has been that the United States, a beacon of hope during the freedom struggles of the Asian peoples, succumbed to the views and greater colonial experience of nations grown to power in an earlier period.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
#54. Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.
Charles Baudelaire
#55. As long as there are human rights to be defended; as long as there are great interests to be guarded; as long as the welfare of nations is a matter for discussion, so long will public speaking have its place.
William Jennings Bryan
#56. Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.
Jimmy Carter
#57. Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
Sigmund Freud
#58. The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.
Heinz Pagels
#59. 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
#60. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ...
Jess Walter
#61. Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations, we free ourselves from the past.
Jack Kornfield
#62. Ireland was, of old, called the Isle of Saints because of the great number of holy ones of both sexes who flourished there in former ages or who, coming thence, propagated the faith amongst other nations.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#63. John Danforth, I thought, was a great senator and did a great job with the United Nations. I think he's a good man.
Ken Mehlman
#64. The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#65. A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.
Woodrow Wilson
#66. Before we become too arrogant with the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, the sin of pride, let us remember that the two great wars of this century, wars which cost twenty million dead, were fought between Christian nations praying to the same God.
Richard M. Nixon
#67. Just as a man would not cherish living in a body other than his own, so do nations not like to live under other nations, however noble and great the latter may be.
Mahatma Gandhi
#68. Great treasures bring out great greed in the hearts of men and great greed has been the downfall of many nations. - from Opoponax Dreams
Genieve Dawkins
#69. If we gave up our freedom as the price of security, we would no longer be the great nation that we are.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#70. Come, everyone! Clap your hands! Shout to God with joyful praise! 2 For the LORD Most High is awesome. He is the great King of all the earth. 3 He subdues the nations before us, putting our enemies beneath our feet.
Anonymous
#71. India has indeed a great and free future before her, in which she can make her special contribution to the well-being of mankind. The first and indispensable part of that contribution is to work with the United Nations for the defeat of fascism and of brutal aggression.
Stafford Cripps
#72. The lady ... is an anomaly to which the western nations of this planet have grown accustomed but which would require a great deal of explanation before a Martian could understand her.
Emily James Smith Putnam
#73. The nation that draws the most materials and provisions from the earth, fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the great power of the earth.
James MacDonald
#74. Jesus said, "Teach all nations." He never said that we need governmental permission to evangelize. Faithfulness to God and the Great Commission compels us to reach beyond borders to people in restricted nations.
Richard Wurmbrand
#75. The great privilege of the Americans does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#76. History," Bagehot wrote, "is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
Roger Kimball
#77. When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.
Denis Diderot
#78. Decades of providing technology in growing volume and at decreasing costs have driven great gains for developing nations, communities and people worldwide, but there is still much to do.
Paul Otellini
#79. I am a witness to nations and people deprived of their freedom. I was there. I watched that great Iron Curtain drop around nations which formerly had prized their freedom - good people. I was aghast as these were written off by the stroke of a pen.
Ezra Taft Benson
#80. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.
A.J.P. Taylor
#82. We are men and women from many lands, representing a rich variety of cultures. And we have been brought together to work in a great common cause: the survival and progress of mankind. The concept of unity in diversity ... underlies our various pursuits at the United Nations.
Kurt Waldheim
#83. The humble histories of hearts cannot be brushed aside forever by the great events of nations.
Milan Kundera
#84. So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#85. All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.
Hjalmar Branting
#86. Nations, like individuals, have been always disposed from interest or vanity to forget their day of small things; like individuals, too, they have always been unwilling to isolate their origins from the great ones who have gone before.
Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett
#87. One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.
"Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?"
"Israel, of course.
Mark Steyn
#88. As a society, we've learned that we're all better off
when everyone is included in the opportunities of this great nation.
Edward Kennedy
#89. To be a mother is the greatest vocation in the world. No being has a position of such great power and influence. She holds in her hands the destiny of nations, for to her is necessarily committed the making of the nation's citizens.
Hannah Whitall Smith
#90. Whatever the scenario, the dynamism of developing nations, their demographics and competitive power are great sources for superiority.
Ali Babacan
#91. Certain it is that a great responsibility rests upon the statesmen of all nations, not only to fulfill the promises for reduction in armaments, but to maintain the confidence of the people of the world in the hope of an enduring peace.
Frank B. Kellogg
#92. The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear.
Samuel Johnson
#93. For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the French, those great anti-venerators, those relentless beheaders of Great Men, worshipped Voltaire.
Chris Anderson
#95. The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.
George Washington
#96. The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
D.H. Lawrence
#97. Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.
Matthew Arnold
#98. A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation.
Zhuangzi
#99. I stood upon the highest mountain of the world and I knew more than I saw, I understood more than I knew, because I was seeing in a sacred manner. And what I saw were the hoops of all the nations interlocking in on great circle.
Black Elk
#100. As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death. The Biafrans had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again. They will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again. Peace.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
