Quotes on Nations

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement. If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board.

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.

And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

The human race has entered a stage where we are all dependent on each other. No other country or nation should be regarded in total separation from another, let alone pitted against another.

There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families and another for nations.

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.

The time has come for an all-out war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these".

To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.

Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.

Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.

Just as a man would not cherish living in a body other than his own, so do nations not like to live under other nations, however noble and great the latter may be.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.