Adopted Country Quotes & Sayings

Ten years after the first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830, the first train timetable was issued. The trains were much faster than the old carriages, so the quirky differences in local hours became a severe nuisance. In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow. More and more institutions followed the lead of the train companies. Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset — Yuval Noah Harari

But then again, he would think, what about his life- and about Jude's life, too- wasn't it a miracle? He should have stayed in Wyoming, he should have been a ranch hand himself. Jude should have wound up - where? In prison, or in a hospital, or dead, or worse. But they hadn't. Wasn't it a miracle that someone who was basically unexceptional could life a life in which he made millions pretending to be other people, that in that life that person would fly from city to city, would spend his days having his every need fulfilled, working in which he was treated like the potentate of a small, corrupt country? Wasn't it a miracle to be adopted at thirty, to find people who loved you so much that they wanted to call you their own? Wasn't it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable?Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn't this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle? — Hanya Yanagihara

Harder still it has proved to rule the dragon Money ... A whole generation adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief they were enriching the country they were impoverishing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Seattle is a place I've lived only a couple of years, but I feel like I've been adopted by this city. It's like a hug. I've been recognized on planes, in the airport and by cabdrivers. I don't get that anywhere else in the country. — Hari Kondabolu

In the weeks after the flood, the Humane Society of the United States organized the biggest animal rescue in history. Hundreds of volunteers from all over the country came to New Orleans. They broke into boarded-up houses, plucked dogs and cats from rooftops and trees, and even rescued pigs and goats. Many animals were reunited with their owners. Others were sent to shelters across America to be adopted by new families. — Lauren Tarshis

Although all new ideas are born in France, they are not readily adopted there. It seems that they must first commence to prosper in a foreign country. — Sarah Bernhardt

They say that democracy cannot be adopted; it has to be adapted to the African way of thinking. What does that mean? That the all-powerful and corrupt political leaders should stay in power? That Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, should appropriate all the country's money for himself, a country with income per capita of more than 20,000 euros thanks to oil but where people suffer hunger and poverty? Or that women should not have any rights? — Fernando Ballano Gonzalo

The Democrats in the Senate adopted a resolution, an amendment, saying that there should be no Guantanamo detainees brought into this country. So, more and more, we're finding the American people on one side, the ACLU and the troglodytes from the New York Times on the other, where they belong. — Peter T. King

Chinese people are very superstitious and do not have floors for any "unlucky" numbers - that is, no numbers that include the number four (e.g., fourteen, twenty four, etc.) since "four" sounds like the word "death" in Chinese. No number thirteen either, as the country has adopted Western superstitions about unlucky thirteen. So, a building that shows fifteen floors on the floor plans physically only has twelve floors. — Wen-Szu Lin

She learned early on, in her adopted country, that race was an easy excuse to stop awkward explanations. People hesitated to probe into such a sensitive matter. — E. Journey

It is sometimes suggested that the [Nazi economic] recovery was a product of a specific fascist economic strategy, which distinguished it from the recovery efforts of other capitalist states. While few would disagree that the Nazi regime had a number of clear ideological preferences when it came to the economy, the policies pursued in 1933 had much in common with those adopted in other countries, and with the policies of the pre-Hitler governments. — Richard Overy

It has not been possible to build that society. It set very high standards, because not only would life in the Soviet Union or in any other country which adopted that system, have to be just as good as in the Capitalist world, it would have to be better. So that other peoples, other nations would want to join it, and obviously we have failed in that. — George Blake

I don't ever worry about whether I'm being true to my country roots. My country roots were adopted. I never worry about what I can do and what I should do. I just do what I want to do. — Emmylou Harris

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. — Oscar Wilde

We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe. — Neville Chamberlain

Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach. — Martina Navratilova

That the state of knowledge in any country will exert a directive influence on the general system of instruction adopted in it, is a principle too obvious to require investigation. — Charles Babbage

The uniform makes for brotherhood, since when universally adopted it covers up all differences of class and country. — Robert Baden-Powell

Racism ... fuelled by bitter assertions that no immigrant ever has the least respect for the environment in his adopted country because he never really believes it's his. — James Hamilton-Paterson

I can never suppose this country so far lost to all ideas of self-importance as to be willing to grant America independence; if that could ever be adopted I shall despair of this country being ever preserved from a state of inferiority and consequently falling into a very low class among the European States. — George III

The wise and the good never form the majority of any large society and it seldom happens that their measures are uniformly adopted ... [All that wise and good men can do is] to persevere in doing their duty to their country and leave the consequences to him who made men only; neither elated by success, however great, nor discouraged by disappointments however frequent or mortifying. — John Jay

The more I see of life in these 'undeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession. — Dervla Murphy

I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law. — George Washington

A "race to innocence" is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression.25 This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country's past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Story of Pakistan' development makes an interesting reading-how a country with lot of baggage of underdevelopment and sets of contradictions and constraints, keeps on stumbling from phase to phase, adopting with religious fervour the mainstream globally accepted development ideas, policies and strategies, which are current at that time. From exclusive emphasis on growth and trickle down of 1960s, she took a U-turn and tried to redistribute the fruits of growth in 1970s.Failing miserably in this endeavour which resulted in an expanded state capitalism; she started denationalizing everything in the following decades and adopted the new mantra of liberalization. She is now struggling to remove poverty in the midst of glaring extravagance of certain classes to avoid bursting at the seams of society. — Shahid Hussain Raja

When 9/11 happened, 12 of our neighborhood firemen were killed. I looked around at the country that had adopted me and I became an American. — Iman Abdulmajid

My country is bleeding, my people are perishing around me. But I feel as a South Carolinian, I am bound to tell the North, go on!go on! Never falter, never abandon the principles which you have adopted. — Angelina Grimke

In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country's founding document: The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now. — Antonin Scalia

I still know this place and its people to the marrow of their bones, to their soft, unguarded core, which had once sustained my own life, yet I am as much of an outsider here as I am on the other side of the world, in my adopted country. The truth is that there is no bridge between the two lives - the past and the present - that would conveniently span the memory of loss and the promise of an onward search. There is only a wound, the inner divide of exile. A daughter of an anatomy professor, I should have known that sliced hearts do not become whole, that split souls do not mend. Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land. — Elena Gorokhova

In the United States, if one family out of every four churches adopted a child, there would be no orphans in the country — Kay Warren

Others did not fare so well. A German man in St. Louis who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag, and hanged. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a patriotic murder. — Bill Bryson

After Obama's victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party's triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control - from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania - passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters. — Ari Berman

I feel like I have adopted the Philippines as my second country. — Dan Hill

For many years, when still a Yugoslav citizen, I was already a Swiss patriot, and in 1959, I obtained Swiss citizenship. However, I consider myself a world citizen, and I am very grateful to my adopted country that it allows me to be one. — Vladimir Prelog

There are two kinds of patriotism
monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:
the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism. — Mark Twain

Happy was my adopted country, not my native land. I was still bracing to be expelled without warning. — Kimberly McCreight

Grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, He had conferred on my beloved country in her emancipation and on myself in permitting me, under circumstances of mercy, to live to the age of 89 years, and to survive the fiftieth year of independence, adopted by Congress on the 4th of July 1776 ... — Charles Carroll Of Carrollton

I go to Malawi twice a year. It's where two of my children were adopted from, and I have a lot of projects there that I go and check up on and children who I look after. It's sort of a commitment that I've made to this country and the hundreds of thousands of children there who have been orphaned by AIDS. — Madonna Ciccone

It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country. — Noah Webster

There are Arab countries providing arms I don't know who they are, nobody comes and tells you 'we are providing arms', but what I say is providing arms and ammunition started with certain countries, I'll name them: Russia and Iran to Syria, so it's normal the other side will seek help ... The last resolution adopted less than three weeks ago said all assistance [to the opposition fighters], all assistance including military, it was added. — Nabil Elaraby