Quotes on Nations

Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal.

I grew up in war and saw the United Nations help my country to recover and rebuild. That experience was a big part of what led me to pursue a career in public service. As Secretary-General, I am determined to see this organization deliver tangible, meaningful results that advance peace, development and human rights.

I dream of an India that is prosperous, strong and caring. An India, that regains a place of honour in the comity of great nations.

The United Nations must focus on delivery rather than process and on people rather than bureaucracy.

The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.

Each particular society begins to feel its strength, whence arises a state of war between different nations.

The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.

No one can tell any nation what it should want. The nation should determine what they want and how to make their nation become as best as it can become - all of us want our nations to be the best of what they can become, for our children.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.

We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to 'build nations.' And when we cannot be sure how to improve the world, hubristic visions pose a grave danger.

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true.

We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

I'm a big proponent of monogamous relationships regardless of sexuality, and I'm proud of how the nation is steering toward that.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.