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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"[My work] is designed to speak for itself. as mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that it will possess an enduring interest."
"As I travel through my country, people often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home -first for six years, then for 19 months. How could I stand the separation from family and friends? It is ironic, I say, that in an authoritarian state it is only the prisoner of conscience who is genuinely free. Yes, we have given up our right to a normal life. But we have stayed true to that most precious part of our humanity-our conscience."
"The people of my country want the two freedoms that spell security: freedom from want and freedom from fear."
"I can say-not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological , ethical, political and esthetic roots-that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."
"This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them."
"Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom."
"Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train."
"First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage."
"If each one of us does our bit, we will be helping to keep global warming from harming our countries."
"We want Shraddhâ, we want faith in our own selves. Strength is life, weakness is death. 'We are the Âtman, deathless and free; pure, pure by nature. Can we ever commit any sin? Impossible!' - such a faith is needed. Such a faith makes men of us, makes gods of us. It is by losing this idea of Shraddha that the country has gone to ruin."
"The United States is a fake country."
"The 2.4 million bright, brave, incredibly fit and remarkably talented young Americans who have served in our armed forces since we were attacked on 9-11-01 are all volunteers. As General Petraeus put it during a conversation we had in Afghanistan, 'They all came or stayed, knowing they were going to war.' For more than a decade, these patriots and their loved ones have made extraordinary sacrifices for this country. They embody the classical definition of heroes: those who put themselves at risk for the benefit of others."
"Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. Center your country in the Tao and evil will have no power. Not that it isn't there, but you'll be able to step out of its way. Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself."
"Nationalism is the love which ties me to the blockheads of my country, to the insultors of my way of life, and to the desecrators of my language."
"Citizenship should be based on those who have a close and real relationship with this country and its inhabitants."
"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality."
"A great man, tender of heart, strong of nerve, boundless patience and broadest sympathy, with no motive apart from his country."
"From several of the Indian tribes inhabiting the country bordering on Lake Erie purchases have been made of lands on conditions very favorable to the United States, and, as it is presumed, not less so to the tribes themselves."
"[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."
"Every human being is in need of talking to somebody. In this country nobody has time. It seems that talking to a friend has gone out of style. Now you have to pay money to go to an analyst."
