Quotes About Nation States

#1. The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.

Wellington Webb

#2. The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.

Andrea Dworkin

#3. What I haven't apologised for is the original concept of seeking to bring justice to all South Africans through the concept of nation states.

F. W. De Klerk

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization.

Howard Zinn

#8. The fact is Qatar, Etihad, Emirates, Singapore, Garuda, all of the three Chinese airlines, Air New Zealand - the fact is that international aviation relies very much upon agreements between nation-states, and it is not an area in which you have free market operations.

Anthony Albanese

#9. Democratic nation states remain far more capable of managing the circuit of coercion, taxation and legitimation than any transnational bodies.

Geoff Mulgan

#10. In addition to anti-American terrorists with global reach, our adversaries include organizations - some nation states, some private and some criminal - that proliferate weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

Dennis C. Blair

#11. One would think that people who insist on being monotheistic would be the first in line to walk across the artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures and even religions. But often they are the last!

Richard Rohr

#12. The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.

Pankaj Mishra

#13. A democratic Europe of nation states could be a force for liberty, enterprise and open trade. But, if creating a United States of Europe overrides these goals, the new Europe will be one of subsidy and protection

Margaret Thatcher

#14. We live in an industrial world with a globalized capitalist economy organized politically around nation-states. Finding a willing audience for even a mild critique of any of these foundational systems is not easy; suggesting that all three systems should be rethought in fundamental ways seems crazy.

Robert Jensen

#15. Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions - such as China, Vietnam, and Iran - look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria.

Pankaj Mishra

#16. Today, a group of 20 individuals empowered by the exponential growing technologies of AI and robotics and computers and networks and eventually nanotechnology can do what only nation states could have done before.

Peter Diamandis

#17. I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce.

Hazel Henderson

#18. Unfortunately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed.

Hannah Arendt

#19. Peace is but the absence of war. War and conflict form the sea through which nation-states swim. Some who have had the fortune to find clear, calm waters believe otherwise. They have forgotten that war is momentum. War is natural. And war makes one strong.

Robert Jackson Bennett

#20. Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states,

Alexei Sayle

#21. Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.

Pankaj Mishra

#22. 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

#23. Because there are little to no consequences for conducting cyberattacks, criminals and nation-states are becoming bolder in their threats and behavior. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are increasingly hacking into U.S. companies and government networks for espionage purposes or financial gain.

Michael McCaul

#24. By and large, the world wants to move away from the nuclear era. The question is how fast and how far. In a world of sovereign nation-states, I can't rationalize any number above zero. If it's more than zero, you have to acknowledge every nation has the right to have them.

George Lee Butler

#25. Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.

Niall Ferguson

#26. The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

Earl Warren

#27. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states.

Hannah Arendt

#28. I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Bill Joy

#29. Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment,

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#30. I live in Europe and care about democracy and sovereignty of nation states there.

Vaclav Klaus

#31. The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don't care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the '99 percent.'

Henry Giroux

#32. U.S. computer networks and databases are under daily cyber attack by nation states, international crime organizations, subnational groups, and individual hackers.

John O. Brennan

#33. I think even nation states should be and will be obsolete. I think nationalism will be seen in the future as a form of tribalism and I think what we call "Democracy" will be "Netocracy", where people, globally, can work on issues.

Deepak Chopra

#34. What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

#35. In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#36. Human survival requires that nation-states give up the institution of war and replace it with a cooperatively-functioning global peace system - for the well-being and security of all people everywhere.

Douglas P. Fry

#37. What we have been raised to think of as inevitable - division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states - actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history.

Gloria Steinem

#38. From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation.

Edward E. Baptist

#39. If he desired an empire, he achieved it with me, for I would carve out every skin in my body and hand it over as states to his greater nation.

Jeni Dhodary

#40. It there any nation that acknowledges its errors and its sins and its crimes and the things it has done that are not consistent with its principles more than the United States? No, there is not.

Bill Bennett

#41. 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

#42. We know that this nation entered into solemn treaties [with Indian tribes] which have been continuously violated for more than 250 years. It's a disgrace. It's an outrage. We must do everything in our power to keep those treaties. Otherwise, the word of the United States government is no good.

John McCain

#43. As the United States has become an older nation, reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier.

Charles Duhigg

#44. Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?

Jacques Barzun

#45. I'd like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation - more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.

Matthew Stewart

#46. The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

Noah Feldman

#47. Bringing the troops home is necessary not just for the future of Iraq, but also for the people of the United States. We must stop the hemorrhaging of tax dollars that could go to meet our Nation's vital domestic needs.

Raul Grijalva

#48. Americans believe with all their heart, the vast majority of them, and the vast majority of Floridians, that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history.

Marco Rubio

#49. The United States established itself as a trustworthy new nation in its first two decades after the Revolutionary War by paying its debts, even when many in the country believed it had no obligation to do so. Alexander Hamilton, the founder of this newspaper, insisted on it.

John Podhoretz

#50. We live in a nation where, when New Jersey figures out how to do something and does it well, and shows progress, it affects other states.

Cory Booker

#51. The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so ... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

Robertson Davies

#52. We offer peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Hebrew nation for the common good of all.

David Ben-Gurion

#53. It is an embarrassment that the United States, the wealthiest nation, has people that go hungry.

Craig T. Nelson

#54. 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

#55. New Mexico is one of the top energy-producing states in the nation.

Heather Wilson

#56. Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.
[Shrub Flubs His Dub, The Nation, June 18, 2001]

Molly Ivins

#57. When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months.

Paul Fussell

#58. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt

#59. My view of foreign policy is that we need to be careful and circumspect about United States intervention in any foreign nation.

Michele Bachmann

#60. The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

John McCain

#61. We, the people of the United States, we are a great Nation with a great vision.

Steve Buyer

#62. 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

#63. The United States, for all its faults, is till the greatest nation in the country.

Spiro T. Agnew

#64. 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

#65. The United States is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles and beliefs.

George W. Bush

#66. The State dominates the Nation because it alone represents it.

Adolf Hitler

#67. 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

#68. The importance to the nation of a generously adequate food supply for the coming year cannot be overemphasized, in view of the economic problems which may arise as a result of the entrance of the United States into the war.

David F. Houston

#69. Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton.

Jimmy Carter

#70. The United States will remain the most powerful nation on Earth for the next 10, 15 years, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered.

Paddy Ashdown

#71. We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies in Europe and Asia.

John T. Flynn

#72. Founded on faith in God, the United States has been blessed as no other nation.

Jeremiah Denton

#73. We have come together with a unity of purpose because our nation demands it. September 11, 2001, was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States.The nation was unprepared. How did this happen, and how can we avoid such tragedy

Anonymous

#74. The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them.

Jay Parini

#75. The Congress of the United States, in recognition of the unique contribution of the Bible in shaping the history and character of this Nation, and so many of its citizens, has by Senate Joint Resolution 165 authorized and requested the President to designate the year 1983 as the 'Year of the Bible.'

Ronald Reagan

#76. Every Latter-day Saint should love the inspired Constitution of the United States - a nation with a spiritual foundation and a prophetic history - which nation the Lord has declared to be his base of operations in these latter days.

Ezra Taft Benson

#77. What the F.D.I.C. does is to put the full faith and credit of the United States government behind every savings account in the nation, up to a limit that has changed over the years and stands now at $100,000.

Nick Clooney

#78. I am concerned that many young people in the Hemisphere seem to envision the United States as a nation intoxicated by power, addicted to warfare, controlled by a military-industrial complex, and determined to preserve the status quo, that we are against rapid economic and social growth.

Luis A. Ferre

#79. I never use the word nation in speaking of the United States. I always use the word Union or Confederacy. We are not a nation but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign States.

John C. Calhoun

#80. We have to make sure that not only we [politicians] actually focus on, but the entire nation knows we're focusing on, growth and competition within the United States of America and compete internationally. I don't know anywhere where it's written that we have to be number two.

Joe Biden

#81. The United States of America is a nation where people are not united because of those three glaring frailties: racism, injustices and inequities.

Yuri Kochiyama

#82. True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down.

Isaac Asimov

#83. There is no bigger judgment for a president of the United States than how you take a nation to war.

John F. Kerry

#84. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan Nation.

John Adams

#85. Quite often, the people who do leave their own nation and come to an unknown destination, like the United States, are inherently adventurous, so we've had that adventurous spirit that has embedded itself collectively in the American consciousness.

Jimmy Carter

#86. Everything that has happened in my life is because of good government and because the United States of America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth.

Andrew Young

#87. Our nation is too different, too diverse to say that what works in Massachusetts is somehow going to be grabbed by the federal government, usurping the power of states and imposing a one-size-fits-all plan on the nation. That will not work.

Mitt Romney

#88. We of the United States consider ourselves blessed. We have much to give thanks for. But the gift of providence we cherish most is that we were given as our neighbors on this wonderful continent the people and the nation of Canada.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#89. The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and bread.

John Muir

#90. 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

#91. Climate change is real, caused by human activity and already devastating our nation and planet. The United States must lead the world in combating climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainability.

Bernie Sanders

#92. The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

Carlos Fuentes

#93. Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.

Michael Parenti

#94. Twelve states in the Great Plains have a wind energy potential greater then the electric use of our entire nation.

Michael Pare

#95. The price of crude oil accounts for 55 percent of the price of a gallon of gasoline, driven by global supply and demand. The United States depends on foreign sources of oil for 62 percent of our nation's supply. By 2010, this is projected to jump to 75 percent.

Gary Miller

#96. It's a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.

Paul Ryan

#97. From the inception of our nation our American ancestors intended for the United States to operate under a precious-metals monetary system or, more specifically, under a monetary system in which people used gold and silver coins rather than paper money as the media of exchange.

Jacob G. Hornberger

#98. 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

#99. The United States is the only nation that can lead the world toward a solution on climate change.

Al Gore

#100. 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