Quotes About Nation

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force, and their submission is wisdom but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.

The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.

The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them.

Inventing the government was the preface to inventing a nation. Governments can be machines, but nations have to accommodate the actual lives of people. People don't live abstract lives. They live real ones, within nations, and those nations give them a sense of who they are.

There is obviously a level in which humans make their own choices, but as Adam Smith pointed out, all those individual choices lead to a predictable nation.

The nation provided a human with the things that are most human—language and a past that stretched back before his birth.

Under a nonrepublican constitution, where subjects are not citizens, the easiest thing in the world to do is to declare war. Here the ruler is not a fellow citizen, but the nation's owner, and war does not affect his table, his hunt, his places of pleasure, his court festivals, and so on. Thus, he can decide to go to war for the most meaningless of reasons, as if it were a kind of pleasure party...

A nation is not (like the ground on which it is located) a possession. It is a society of men whom no one other than the nation itself can command or dispose of.

Ese era el peligro del terrorismo: la astucia de un solo individuo camuflado en la multitud contra la fuerza titánica de la nación más poderosa del mundo.

Occasions for appealing to public compassion are never wanting in a nation eternally rocked by catastrophes that shake the foundations of life, floods that sweep away entire towns, gigantic waves that deposit ships in the center of a plaza. We are created in the idea that life is precarious, and we are always waiting for the next calamity to happen.

No nation had wanted to report the true number of deaths. Only Spain, who had remained neutral in the conflict, shared news of the illness, which is why it ended up being called the Spanish influenza.

Ninguna nación admitía el número de sus bajas; sólo España, que se mantuvo neutral en el conflicto, difundía noticias sobre la enfermedad y por eso acabaron llamándola «influenza española».

I think it's inevitable that New Zealand will become a republic and that would reflect the reality that New Zealand is a totally sovereign-independent 21st century nation 12,000 miles from the United Kingdom.

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

I've seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth.

On April 18, 1980, the last outpost of empire in Africa died. From Rhodesia's ashes rose a country that would take its place among the free nations as Zimbabwe, the last among equals. And men and women leapt to embrace this dream called Zimbabwe.

Greece has given Europe the opportunity to fix a defect in the euro zone, that is the fact that we did not have a fiscal union. Now steps have been taken to begin that process. And there is more solidarity from nation to nation, and that is a good thing. That has been Greece's gift to Europe.

The Americans believe they answered all first questions in 1776: since then they've just been hammering out the practical details.

The first book of the nation is the dictionary of its language.

Canada is a society, rather than a nation.

Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity.

To be Canadian is to live in relative calm and with great dignity.

If we can find out why the idea rather than the nation of Canada can win a growing loyalty rather than commanding it, then, it seems to me, we shall have come very near to trapping the elusive creature, the Canadian Identity.