A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
Plato

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.
Voltaire

Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars.
Dale Carnegie

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.
Barack Obama

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.
Barack Obama

One of the great strengths of the United States is... we have a very large Christian population - we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.
Barack Obama

And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.
Barack Obama

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu

England is a nation of shopkeepers.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ayn Rand

I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.
Douglas MacArthur

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Jean-Paul Sartre

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
John Adams