Nations Quotes - Page 14

• 'A Naval History of Britain' which begins in the 7th century has to explain what it means by Britain. My meaning is simply the British Isles as a whole, but not any particular nation or state or our own day... 'Britain' is not a perfect word for this purpose, but 'Britain and Ireland' would be both cumbersome and misleading, implying an equality of treatment which is not possible. Ireland and the Irish figure often in this book, but Irish naval history, in the sense of the history of Irish fleets, is largely a history of what might have been rather than what actually happened.

  Nicholas Rodger

  Book, Mean, Perfect

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• The country (England) which was called a nation of pirates in the years around 1600 would eventually become the pirates' greatest scourge, not just in English waters but throughout the world.

  Peter Earle

  Country, Years, Water

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• England can end the millenium as it started - as the greatest football nation in the world.

  Kevin Keegan

  Soccer, Football, World

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• The combination of an out-of-control tabloid press and a readership that thrills to the destruction of the England head coach is something no other country can offer. Scolari was driven out; Steve McClaren's personal life made the front pages. Neither of them even held the job. Then there was the fake-sheikhing of Sven-Göran Eriksson. That a newspaper should so brilliantly and deliberately destabilise the national head coach in a World Cup year is something no other sporting nation would consider.

  Simon Barnes

  Soccer, Football, Country

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• If every violent program in the nation were blipped off the air for 48 hours, and replaced by reruns of the 'Donna Reed Show', there would not be one less death in South Central LA. At most you'd have several more incidents of people shooting out their TVs.

  J. Michael Straczynski

  Air, People, Television

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• It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Art, Philosophy, Past

  "Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia". Book by Baltasar Gracián, § 1, 1647.

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• The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all on State ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of every profession, has almost killed the citizen's power to react upon that which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark of life.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Law

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• Here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Wisdom, Pain, Educational

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• But if not Kelso, then something else, because a free people must own the nation they live in.

  Nicholas von Hoffman

  Wisdom, People, Politics

  Nicholas Von Hoffman (1970). “Left at the post”, Crown

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• The party should stand for a constantly wider diffusion of property. That is the greatest social and economic security that can come to free men. It makes free men. We want a nation of proprietors, not a state of collectivists. That is attained by creating a national wealth and income, not by destroying it. The income and estate taxes create an orderly movement to diffuse swollen fortunes more effectively than all the quacks.

  Herbert Hoover

  Wisdom, Party, Men

  Herbert Hoover (1938). “Addresses upon the American road”

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• In our time, in particular, there exists another form of ownership which is becoming no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and skill. The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more on this kind of ownership than on natural resources.

  Pope John Paul II

  Wisdom, Technology, Land

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• A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I'm saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Wisdom, Military, Years

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• For when men know they are working on what belongs to them, they work with far greater eagerness and diligence. Nay, in a word, they learn to love the land cultivated by their own hands, whence they look not only for food but for some measure of abundance for themselves and their dependents. All can see how much this willing eagerness contributes to an abundance of produce and the wealth of a nation.

  Pope Leo XIII

  Men, Hands, Land

  Catholic Church. Pope (1878-1903 : Leo XIII)., Pope Leo XIII (1987*). “On the Condition of Workers”

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• We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nations to the changed conditions.

  James Madison

  Wisdom, Country, Hands

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• If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Wisdom, Art, Mean

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• So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Running, War, Democracy

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• Adam Smith's was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation... But the "children of darkness" were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the "ideology" of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Children, Real, Community

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• Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues. Like, fear and the way fear controls us. How the governing body of a town, or a nation, controls us through fear. They might mean well by it, but we are conditioned to be afraid of things. Fear of the unknown. Fear of terrorism. And it's unfortunate.

  Adrien Brody

  Mean, Issues, Village

  Roundtable interview, www.ign.com. July 30, 2004.

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• This organic conception of society, the only vital conception, combines a noble humanism with the genuine Christian spirit, and it bears the inscription from Holy Writ which St. Thomas has explained: "The work of justice shall be peace"; a text applicable to the life of a people whether it be considered in itself or in its relations with other nations.

  Pope Pius XI

  Christian, People, Justice

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• We hold that the ownership of private property is the right and privilege of every American citizen and is one of the foundation stones upon which this nation and its free enterprise system has been built and has prospered. We feel that private property rights and human rights are inseparable and indivisible. Only in those nations that guarantee the right of ownership of private property as basic and sacred under their law is there any recognition of human rights.

  John Rarick

  Wisdom, Rights, Law

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• Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation's wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?

  Ronald Reagan

  Wisdom, Employment, Politics

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• It should be clear to everyone that the nation's steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy.

  Ronald Reagan

  Meaningful, Wisdom, Opportunity

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• Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Wisdom, Support, Tree

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• Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Wisdom, Civilization, Favors

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1941). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1937, Volume 6”, p.646, Best Books on

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• What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Wisdom, Men, Politics

  Theodore Roosevelt (2006). “History as Literature and Other Essays”, p.197, Cosimo, Inc.

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