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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"It's the old American Double Standard, ya know: Say one thing, do somethin' different. And of course this country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free."
"An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as peas in the same pod."
"Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels."
"All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which is ridiculous. I haven't done anything yet, and I think it's just common sense to send me to Washington and make me do my share."
"The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!"
"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."
"Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation."
"A people fired ... with love of their country and of liberty, a zeal for the public good, and a noble emulation of glory, will not be disheartened or dispirited by a succession of unfortunate events. But like them, may we learn by defeat the power of becoming invincible."
"I feel that my father's greatest legacy was the people he inspired to get involved in public service and their communities, to join the Peace Corps, to go into space. And really that generation transformed this country in civil rights, social justice, the economy and everything."
"In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
"I don't want anything bad to happen to the United States, but if North Korea ever drops a nuclear bomb on this country, I swear to God, I hope it lands in Hartford."
"It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy."
"He who seeks truth should be of no country."
"The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country."
"If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say : Let the damned thing go down the drain!"
"I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government."
"The ambition of the present Labour government is that every worker in the country will have a greater than average income."
"How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape."
"Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all men are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all men and all countries — not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of mankind as civilized."
"Always was Morocco. And recently the country's leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier -- what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in -- that's here to stay."
