Quotes
Quotes about Nation
A fine woman shows her charms to most advantage when she seems most to conceal them. The finest bosom in nature is not so fine as what imagination forms.
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast?
The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation.
All the arts which belong to polished life have some common tie, and are connect as it were by some relationship. [Lat., Etenim omnes artes, quae ad humanitatem pertinent, habent quoddam commune vinculum, et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.]
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it "joy"?.
The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.
Life a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of the future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
How lovely he appears! his little cheeks In their pure incarnation, vying with The rose leaves strewn beneath them. And his lips, too, How beautifully parted! No; you shall not Kiss him; at least not now; he will wake soon-- His hour of midday rest is nearly over.
I knew a very wise man that believed that . . . if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. - Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (2),
I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have-for their usefulness. -Thomas Merton.
The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!
Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood ... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.
The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men. And character comes from boyhood. Thus every boy is a challenge to his elders.
Nation of shopkeepers.
When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
On a 60-mile stretch of road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq, a convoy of more than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were fleeing. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, leaving in cars, trucks, carts, and on foot. The American armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait City to Basra, sealing it off and then bombed the other end of the highway, sealing it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hill overlooking the area and then, both from the air and the land, massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on those trapped in the traffic jams, backed up as much as 20 miles. One U.S. pilot reportedly said, It was like shooting fish in a barrel. That fateful stretch of road has since been dubbed the Highway of Death. In a report submitted to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, charges are made that those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the siege of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. The report claims that no attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians. ***** The Guardian newspaper in the UK has written of the 9000 Iraqis killed by the RAF bombs in 1920, one of the 6 times British oil interests have violated the people of Iraq in the last 86 years.
The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created--created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination. -John Schaar.
The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and ;Independence.
The measure of life is not its duration, but its donation.
