Quotes About Nation-building

Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him. Or give it up. This is not a game of cards! This is your life and mine! I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody is going to knock it down.

I did not know I was to spend the rest of my life getting Singapore not just to work but to prosper and flourish.

But for a very small number of people, what we stood for could easily have done a great deal of good for Malaysia and established it for many centuries to come as a stable and viable multiracial nation. ... Kinship and feelings for one another cannot be legislated out by a political decision.

We develop sentiments that we are only going to work with people like us. But you don't build up a nation by working with people like you. You overcome a history of conflict by reaching out to people very much unlike you.

One of the things that we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country.

Lincoln's significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.

I think that before you take on nation building in your mind's eye as to how it should be, you'd better have a clear understanding if this is doable and will work.

If the whole word, except the United States, sank under the ocean, that community could get its living. They carved it out of the prairie and the forest. They're going to have a strong national resurgence in the near future.

One of the architects of what is now the world's only superpower was Thomas Jefferson.

A young boy was asked by an old man, What is your dream?. The boy said, I want to build a country so I can adopt all homeless people from all over the world.

Lasting peace and security in Iraq and Afghanistan will be achieved when we establish the conditions for democratic, economically viable nations.

Since Bin Laden's death, many Americans have decided that our job in Afghanistan is done. They see a victory in the counterterrorism campaign, and are tired of the corruption, confusion and dysfunction of the nation-building campaign.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.

In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.

My father's own view was more than entrepreneurship; it was really a passion to build an institution in India.

We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this.

We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world. Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all.

One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.

Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic.

It was easy to denounce that American vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to accuse it of obscuring the inner cities and drugs and violence, and the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies. But to people from tormented societies, America was the country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, and where many individuals could afford to look beyond the struggles for food, shelter and security that still weighed upon people elsewhere.

All together, dear brothers and sisters, workers and government employees, workers by brain and by hand, rich and poor, Africans and Europeans, Catholics and Protestants, Kimbanguists and Kitawalists, let us unite and create a great nation.

He makes nations great and destroys them; He enlarges nations, then disperses them.