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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"We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban."
"Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country"
"Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels."
"He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in."
"What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."
"I guess the wildcard here is Terrence Malick. He supervised me while I was writing the script for Beautiful Country, and he is a genius, although not always easy to follow. What I learned from him is that the narrative can be tracked through all kinds of scenes, that the strong narrative thread is not always the one that is most obvious. Creating narrative with Malick was a bit like chasing a butterfly through a jungle. This approach to narrative is fun and complicated, something that makes the process of writing constantly interesting to this writer."
"Perhaps no man is an island, but every man and woman is a nation unto herself. I actually had to look up the definition of "nation"; this is how awkward my relation is to this concept. And it is defined as, "a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory." Perhaps if you replace "descent" with "dissent" the definition becomes more meaningful."
"I was trying to hold up a mirror to this country, to reflect the past years or so, and the varying degrees in which we've been affected by the war(s) that doesn't seem to end. And we've all been affected somehow, even if we have no connection to the military, even if we don't know anyone who's killed or been killed. No one escapes something so large."
"to tyrannize for the country is to tyrannize over the country"
"The thing which seems so glorious when viewed from the heights of the country's cause looks so muddy when seen from the bottom. One begins by getting angry and then feels disgusted."
"I am aware of the sufferings of women in India, which is also the suffering of women in many, many countries on our planet. My heart is filled with empathy and love for them."
"Countries have lost their culture because what they wanted was money. Money became the running theme in every country and culture was sacrificed."
"In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country."
"Getting into creating in a new genre is like arriving to a new country."
"I could have taken the easy life and just done classical, but I felt very strongly about the album, my first pop album, the first time that I'd fused so many influences. I was very proud when it was in the charts in 25 countries at once."
"Every Olympics is something special. If you're fortunate enough to play for your country - there's just so much energy. It's truly amazing."
"Our president has made historic progress toward equality. He repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” so that no American ever again has to lie about who they are in order to serve the country we love. Republicans want to write discrimination into our Constitution. But the Wisconsin I know believes that with each passing year and each generation, our country must become more equal, not less."
"The situation in Turkey is extremely troubling. A panic-stricken regime, desperate to divide the Kurdish population from non-Kurds because it feared the rise of the HDP, has helped to create a huge crisis in the country. Can it be ended while Tayyip Erdogan remains in power? I don't think so. Erdogan may not be a "joker," but he is definitely a political plagiarist."
"What we are seeing in Turkey is a non-uniformed authoritarian regime led by a politician, Tayyip Erdogan, who has allowed power to go to his head and is behaving more and more like a despot. Sooner or later this will provoke political uprisings throughout the country as happened after Gezi."
"The judgement makes no sense at all. It exposes the country, Turkey, to ridicule. It would have been so much better if Ahmet Davotgulu had behaved like a medieval jester, but no such luck for poor Turkey. Its Prime Minister is not taken seriously by too many people."
