Country quotes
20.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside country — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In a virtuous and free state, no rewards can be so pleasing to sensible minds, as those which include the approbation of our fellow citizens. My great pain is, lest my poor endeavours should fall short of the kind expectations of my country."
"The merchant has no country ."
"Our [Virginia's] act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The Ambassadors and ministers of the several nations of Europe resident at this court have asked me copies of it to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopédie. I think it will produce considerable good even in those countries where ignorance, superstition, poverty and oppression of body and mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped."
"A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree.... Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to its value as well as to its ornament."
"Bill Clinton, talking about the need to financially empower wives and mothers in regressive countries, once remarked that women have 'the responsibility gene.' No one has that gene more markedly than his wife."
"In USA, a black man only have like five years we can exhibit maximum strength, and that's right now while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. 'Cause once you turn 30, it's like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a black man, in this country. And you don't wanna fight no more."
"What I want to know, though, is why all of a sudden is everybody acting like gangs are some new phenomenon in this country? Almost everyone in America is affiliated with some kind of gang. We got the FBI, the ATF, the police departments, the religious groups, the Democrats and the Republicans. Everybody's got their own little clique and they're all out there gangbanging in their own little way."
"My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so."
"You hear some people talk about border security and a wall and all that. To me, I don't know that you need any of that if you had a better, saner way to let people into the country in the first place."
"[Americans] think that choice, as seen through the American lens, best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures."
"A foreign country can best be understood through its literature."
"It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders."
"She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street."
"What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us."
"Congress actually authorized the printing and payment for a Bible. That illustrates the high regard that the Bible was held in early American society. We see biblical ideas woven into the founding documents of our country like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence explicity states "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." This is a biblical idea stemming from the dignity of all people - Psalm 139:14 - we are fearfully and wonderfully made."
"Cross-country running was so beautiful with all the trails and the lake regions ... very physical and also a bit spiritual, where you could come over the mountain and all of a sudden you'd see a Buddhist landscape fog."
"I also believe this blessed land was set apart in a very special way, a country created by men and women who came here not in search of gold, but in search of God. They would be free people, living under the law with faith in their Maker and their future. Sometimes, it seems we've strayed from that noble beginning, from our conviction that standards of right and wrong do exist and must be lived up to."
"We're more than friends and neighbors and allies; we are kin, who together have built the most productive relationship between any two countries in the world today."
"Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic."
"There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible."
