Nations Quotes - Page 32

• Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.

  Agnes Repplier

  Humor, Obscure, Social

  Agnes Repplier (1894). “In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers”

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• The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.

  Agnes Repplier

  Strong, Men, Law

  Agnes Repplier (2009). “American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier”, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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• America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.

  Agnes Repplier

  Blessed, Son, America

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• I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.

  John Ruskin

  Believe, Greatness, Men

  John Ruskin (2013). “The Stones of Venice -: The Fall”, p.158, Cosimo, Inc.

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• nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Decay, Surrender, Assault

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• Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading. ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Writing, School

  Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.184, Random House

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• Nice is a pallid virtue. Not like honesty or courage or perseverance. On the other hand, in a nation notably lacking in civility, there is much to be said for nice.

  Molly Ivins

  Perseverance, Honesty, Nice

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• If an armed nation were a polite nation, America would be paradise. We have more than 200 million guns in private owernship here. But our manners are not getting better.

  Molly Ivins

  Gun, America, Get Better

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Given the scope of these programs, it's understandable that many would be concerned about issues related to privacy. But what's difficult to understand is the motivation of somebody who intentionally would seek to warn the nation's enemies of lawful programs created to protect the American people. And I hope that he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  Mitch McConnell

  Motivation, Law, Nsa

  "Earlier Denials Put Intelligence Chief in Awkward Position". Statement to the Press, www.nytimes.com. June 11, 2013.

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• Our intelligence agencies will continue to gather information about the intentions of governments - as opposed to ordinary citizens - around the world, in the same way that the intelligence services of every other nation does. We will not apologize simply because our services may be more effective.

  Barack Obama

  Agency, Government, Nsa

  President Obama’s speech on NSA reforms, www.washingtonpost.com. January 17, 2014.

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• The arts are part of a nation's identity, they are part of a nation's soul and when we look at a country from the eyes of people overseas they are part of a nations branding in the world as it were.

  George Brandis

  Country, Art, Eye

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• We need to tell Australian stories,we need to encourage and fund and present Australian work but we also need to understand that for a sophisticated, educated, culturally aware, modern nation we can't be parochial.

  George Brandis

  Needs, Stories, Sophisticated

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Slavery is nothing to joke about! And the history of this nation's [the USA's] involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

  Douglas Wilder

  Usa, Slavery, Involvement

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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