Quotes About Nation

America isn't perfect, nor could any nation ever be, but that she has granted more people more freedoms than any other country in the history of the world.

it cost the nation billions per year for government-funded shelters, dental care, and cost-of-living allowances (which frequently exceeded the minimum wages in neighboring

While Republicans were working to end slavery and secure civil rights, the new nation of southern Democrats was determined to head in an opposite direction.

There was indeed a clear difference between the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats on the issue of race and racial equality. Southern Democrats had been willing to form an entire nation on the foundation of white supremacy – and there was no doubt that the South was strongly Democratic.

Read again or hear a great actor speak aloud Lincoln's Gettysburg Address[141] – only this time envision he's talking to you, right now. No squinting. No adjustments or allowances for time or context. Simply talking exactly to and about us, right now. It's shockingly pertinent. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

one by Alasdair Gray – relayed by my colleague, author Ken McLeod[143] – that sums everything so-concisely and optimistically, but with a slightly science-fictional flair: "Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.

Government . . . consists of a nation's efforts to settle the differences amongst its component parts — its citizens.

In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness

As a rule, almost all of them are Midwesterners...This area of the country, what are we to say of this area of the country, Ms. Beadsman?...Both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity. Corn, a steady waning complex of heavy industry, and sports. What are we to say? We feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn't know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually. What are we to say about it?

the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent—that is ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony

Of a new-era'd nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deep-dry-cleaned and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags and hang up its cuffs to spend some quality domestic time raking its lawn and cleaning its refrigerator and dandling its freshly bathed kids on its neatly pressed mufti-pants' knee.

Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

neighbor I say to you: forget for a moment the Entertainment, and think instead about a U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose?

Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of doers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.

Elige tu templo de fanatismo con suma atención. Lo que vosotros quisierais cantar como amor trágico es un vínculo mal elegido. ¿Morir por una persona? Eso es una locura. Las personas cambian, se van, mueren, enferman. Se marchan, mienten, enloquecen, enferman, te traicionan, mueren. Vuestra nación os sobrevive. Una causa os sobrevive

And do not let squeamish Tories cry out about disloyalty; if the crown does wrong, the crown must be corrected by the nation, out of respect, of course, for the crown.

The moment of a fall from greatness often comes just when a people and a nation feel most secure. The cry the barbarians are at the gates too often comes as a terrifying bolt out of the blue, which is often the last cry ever heard.

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

I still don't know where the evil comes from that makes men bestial to others like you have told . . . . Perhaps it is because you have so little evil in yourself. No, no, I do not think so. That is not what I meant at all. I do not believe that ordinary men have this evil. Perhaps it is like a fever that blows in the air, like cholera, like the plague; it blows in the air and settles on men -- or a town -- or a nation -- and everyone in it, or nearly everyone, falls a victim.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

A man will perhaps tolerate an offensive word applied to himself, but will be infuriated if his nation, his rank, or his profession is insulted.

compulsory duty on every male German reaching the age of twenty. For six months he would have to serve his country, constructing roads, building barracks, or draining marshes, thus fitting him physically and morally for the crowning duty of a German citizen, service with the armed forces.

The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast.