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 is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."
"I had been conscious a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Secretary Of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.'"
"Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions."
"If ever there was a time this country needed the intervention of God, it is now."
"Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals."
"Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected."
"The most upsetting thing is that the US is a leader in the world, and if they don't sign, then how do you expect to convince Russian and China and Iran, Pakistan, all these other countries, to sign? They simply won't. (The US government) feels it's against their constitutional right to bear arms, or they've said that it's needed in North and South Korea, on the border. I don't think any of these are good enough excuses for the damage."
"The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."
"That would be nice if [people] stuck [treasury bills] all under a mattress, but they got to buy something with them. Sometimes they buy a treasury note, sometimes they set up sovereign wealth funds. They can do all kinds of things. They can buy our companies here. As long as we consume more than we produce, and we trade away little pieces of the country daily, they're going to own something. Now, they can't run from American assets. I mean every day the rest of the world is going to have about two billion more of American assets than we have, as long as they sell us these goods."
"Oh, I think it's definitely spiritual. All music is. I think it's maybe one of the highest forms of spirituality."
"I realized that there was a thrilling undiscovered country to be explored in the mechanisms of the mammalian nervous system. Through it, one might approach the mystery of the mind."
"The notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working must be erased forever."
"Such is the moral construction of the world that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run... Were present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them in future times. The seeds of hatred and revenge which they sow with a large hand will not fail to produce their fruits in time. Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain."
"At every instant and from every side, resounds the call of Love: We are going to sky, who wants to come with us? We have gone to Heaven, we have been the friends of the angels, And now we will go back there, for there is our country."
"America is a fortunate country. She grows by the follies of our European nations."
"I don't favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."
"If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government."
"When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future."
"Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive."
"I feel like Barack Obama's an Illuminati puppet. He's basically dragged this country down into the worst it's ever been. Like I say about the White House, 'You've built this house of shame'. Everybody looked up at the White House and America and now I think it's like a house of shame. I miss the old days when people were proud to be American."
