Quotes About Nation

If there is one thing a reader should take away from this book, it is that there is little certain about our nation except that it remains an experiment that requires our serious and sustained attention to thrive.

He was fighting not for them but for a word. Ireland. Not moorlands and rivers, not people, but a word. The word was a bell, vibrant and thrilling, ringing through her memories of conversations. Ireland. Ireland was oppressed. Ireland must fight for its freedom. Ireland must take its place among the nations of the world.

While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what's on the line is American liberty itself.

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes.

In politics and in his personal life, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but in one thing he was consistent: the wanted the best of everything, for himself and for his country.

A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society

No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.

The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.

This is the Fourth?

But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.

God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.

This illustrates an important point: then as now, Americans tend to think about issues like macroeconomic policy or foreign affairs only when things go wrong. The rest of the time, they remain happily unaware of the policies and processes that function well everyday while the nation goes about its business.

Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.

There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.

He that is the author of war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

But any war is harvest to such Governments, however ruinous it may be to a nation. It serves to keep up deceitful expectations, which prevent a people looking into the defects and abuses of Government. It is the "lo here!" and the "lo there!" that amuses and cheats the multitude.

We now see all over Europe, and particularly in England, the curious phenomenon of a nation looking one way, and the government the other - the one forward and the other backward. If governments are to go on by precedent, while nations go on by improvement, they must at last come to a final separation; and the sooner and the more civilly they determine this point, the better.

One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been, that it led to a discovery of the principles, and laid open the imposition, of governments. All the revolutions till then had been worked within the atmosphere of a court, and never on the grand floor of a nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers; and whatever was their rage for reformation, they carefully preserved the fraud of the profession.

Let it then be heard, and let man learn to feel that the true greatness of a nation is founded on principles of humanity, and not on conquest.

Always remembering, that our strength is continental, not provincial:)

It is possible that a nation my be the carrier for the world, but she cannot be the merchant. She cannot be the seller and buyer of her own merchandise. The ability to buy must reside out of herself; and therefore, the prosperity of any commercial nation is regulated by the prosperity of the rest. If they are poor she cannot be rich, and her condition, be what it may, is an index of the height of the commercial tide in other nations.

There can be no such thing as a nation flourishing alone in commerce: she can only participate; and the destruction of it in any part must necessarily affect all. When, therefore, governments are at war, the attack is made upon a common stock of commerce, and the consequence is the same as if each had attacked his own.