Nations Quotes - Page 23

• It is a well-settled principle of the international code that where one nation owes another a liquidated debt which it refuses or neglects to pay the aggrieved party may seize on the property belonging to the other, its citizens or subjects, sufficient to pay the debt without giving just cause of war.

  Andrew Jackson

  War, Party, Giving

  Andrew Jackson (1837). “Messages ...: With a Short Sketch of His Life”, p.286

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• If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror.

  Madame de Stael

  Imagination, Looks, Four

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• No nation has the right to bring about a revolution, even though such a change may be most urgently needed, if the price is the blood of one single innocent individual.

  Madame de Stael

  War, Blood, May

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• Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself.

  Madame de Stael

  Russia, Race, Civilization

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• Like men, nations are purified and strengthened by trials.

  Samuel Smiles

  Men, Trials

  Samuel Smiles (1872). “Character”, p.27

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• If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Spiritual, Respect, Hate

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.99, Ultramarine Publishing

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• If we buy a plant of a horticulturist we ask him many questions as to its needs, whether it thrives best in sunshine or in shade, whether it needs much or little water, what degrees of heat or cold; but when we hold in our arms for the first time a being of infinite possibilities, in whose wisdom may rest the destiny of a nation, we take it for granted that the laws governing its life, health, and happiness are intuitively understood, that there is nothing new to be learned in regard to it.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Children, Sunshine, Destiny

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2016). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: As Revealed in Her Letters & Diary (Abridged)”, p.78, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another?

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Class, Lasts, Election

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (1889). “History of woman suffrage”

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• In a nation of celebrity worshipers, amid followers of the cult of personality, individual modesty becomes a heroic quality. I find heroism in the acceptance of anonymity, in the studied resistance to the normal American tropism toward the limelight.

  Shana Alexander

  Acceptance, Cult Of Personality, Quality

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• If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Writing, Government, Views

  Elizabeth Janeway (1974). “Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening”, New York : Morrow, 1974, 1975 printing.

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• The ocean is the grand vehicle of trade, and the uniter of distant nations. To us it is peculiarly kind, not only as it wafts into our ports the harvests of every climate, and renders our island the centre of traffic, but also as it secures us from foreign invasion by a sort of impregnable intrenchment.

  James Hervey

  Ocean, Islands, Climate

  James Hervey (1856). “Meditations and contemplations: to which is prefixed the life of the author”, p.90

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• We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about a particular degree of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Believe, Passion, Exercise

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2010). “The Irony of American History”, p.5, University of Chicago Press

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• Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Dream, Responsibility, Exercise

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.551, Library of America

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• Blest be the gracious Power, who taught mankind
  To stamp a lasting image of the mind!
  Beasts may convey, and tuneful birds may sing,
  Their mutual feelings, in the opening spring;
  But Man alone has skill and power to send
  The heart's warm dictates to the distant friend;
  'Tis his alone to please, instruct, advise
  Ages remote, and nations yet to rise.

  George Crabbe

  Spring, Heart, Men

  George Crabbe (1858). “The Poetical Works of George Crabbe”, p.60

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• In what pagan nation was Moloch ever propitiated by such an unbroken and swift-moving procession of victims as are offered to this Moloch of Christendom, intemperance.

  Horace Mann

  Moving, Unbroken, Pagan

  Horace Mann (1852). “Two Lectures on Intemperance: The effects of intemperance on the poor and ignorant. The effects of intemperance on the rich and educated. I.. II.”, p.74

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• The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.

  Hannah Arendt

  Lying, Battle, Losing

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.

  Annie Besant

  Country, White Privilege, Land

  Annie Besant (1913). “Wake Up, India: A Plea for Social Reform”

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• It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, United States, Poverty

  Marian Wright Edelman (2013). “The Measure of our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours”, p.74, Beacon Press

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• Dublin ... is not only the capital of a nation, but the capital of an idea. The idea of Irishness is not universally beloved. Some people mock it, some hate it, some fear it. On the whole, though, I think it fair to say, the world interprets it chiefly as a particular kind of happiness, a happiness sometimes boozy and violent, but essentially innocent: and this ineradicable spirit of merriment informs the Dublin genius to this day.

  Jan Morris

  Hate, Thinking, Ideas

  Jan Morris (1976). “Travels”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• God does not seek to destroy the evil nations, but their evil.

  Sholem Asch

  Evil, Doe

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• Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religiosu wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man?

  Thomas Paine

  War, Men, Blood

  Thomas Paine (1824). “The Theological Works of Thomas Paine”, p.151

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• In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is-yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos.

  Gore Vidal

  Sky, Religion, Doe

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• The ideal to which John Adams subscribed-that we would be a nation of laws, not of men-was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly antihuman.

  Gore Vidal

  Sex, Men, Gambling

  Gore Vidal (2007). “Selected Essays”, Abacus Software

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• The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure.... The next Republican Administration will...not only protect the cherished human right of property ownership, but will also work to help millions of Americans - particularly those from disadvantaged groups - to share in the ownership of the wealth of their nation.

  Jeffrey H Reiman

  Wisdom, Government, Long

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• The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Wisdom, Believe, Responsibility

  Theodore Roosevelt (2006). “History as Literature and Other Essays”, p.187, Cosimo, Inc.

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