Countries Without Borders Quotes & Sayings

Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations. — Amy Goodman

I don't believe in countries, governments, institutions or borders. I believe in people. When someone asks for my passport, I feel insulted. — Robin Sacredfire

I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you're young and asleep. Look at all these borders foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate ... I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck; I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body. — Warsan Shire

The borders between different countries are, in truth, not real. They are a by-product of the ego. — Christopher Dines

Our national prosperity is built on our open borders. However, the reality is that if a points system is introduced in the UK it would be unavoidable for us in the Netherlands to implement similar proposals - and inevitable that many other EU countries would follow suit. — Mark Rutte

A more serious concern would be if the United States turned inward and seriously curtailed immigration. With its current levels of immigration, America is one of the few developed countries that may avoid demographic decline and keep its share of world population, but this might change if reactions to terrorist events or public xenophobia closed the borders. Fears over the effect of immigration on national values and on a coherent sense of American identity have existed since the early years of the nation. — Joseph S. Nye Jr.

It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain. As water becomes scarce and countries are forced to divert irrigation water to cities and industry, they will import more grain. As they do so, water scarcity will be transmitted across national borders via the grain trade. Aquifer depletion is a largely invisible threat, but that does not make it any less real. — Lester R. Brown

China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has fourteen countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would involve in a disastrous for the peace of the world. — Henry A. Kissinger

[...]if Nazi Germany had not invaded other countries but had simply sought to eliminate the entire Jewish population within its own territorial borders, this would not have constituted a violation of international law, as incredible as this now seems. — Mark Gibney

[Immigrants] who come from anywhere there is hunger, unemployment, oppression, and violence and who clandestinely cross the borders of countries that are prosperous, peaceful, and rich in opportunity, are certainly breaking the law, but they are exercising a natural and moral right which no legal norm or regulation should try to eliminate: the right to life, to survival, to escape the infernal existence they are condemned to by barbarous regimes entrenched on half the earth's surface. If ethical considerations had any pervasive effect at all, the women and men who brave the Straits of Gibraltar or the Florida Keys or the electric fences of Tijuana or the docks of Marseilles in search of work, freedom, and a future should be received with open arms. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Entire countries would close their borders and build walls to keep out phantom threats. Can you imagine? — Erika Johansen

One day there will be no borders, no boundaries, no flags and no countries and the only passport will be the heart — Carlos Santana

Life is full of borders. Some of them, once crossed, can never be crossed again in the other direction. But there are new countries to discover across every one. — Tim Pratt

What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, since uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production to a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market. — Hannah Arendt

In today's world, it is shortsighted to think that infectious diseases cannot cross borders. By allowing developing countries access to generic drugs, we not only help improve health in those nations, we also help ourselves control these debilitating and often deadly diseases. — Ron Wyden

Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn't hit fully until you've been in a place for a long time. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal.
Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on their path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? — Margot Lee Shetterly

The United States need to put internet processes, policies, and procedures in place with real laws that forbid going beyond the borders of what's reasonable to ensure that the only time that we and other countries around the world exercise these authorities are when it is absolutely necessary. — Edward Snowden

The evidence is now clear that the majority of people coming across the border are not from Mexico. They're coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. Those countries are the source of the people that are now coming in its majority. — Marco Rubio

The G7 - and earlier, the G8 - were a group of countries that shared the same values with regard to freedom and democracy, and through the annexation of Crimea, Russia made it clear at a certain point that these values of keeping the peace, integrity of the borders of a country were not being respected. — Angela Merkel

The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike. — Charles Finch

Many countries in the Middle East are artificial creations. European colonialists drew their national borders in the nineteenth or twentieth century, often with little regard for local history and tradition, and their leaders have had to concoct outlandish myths in order to give citizens a sense of nationhood. Just the opposite is true of Iran. This is one of the world's oldest nations, heir to a tradition that reaches back thousands of years, to periods when great conquerors extended their rule across continents, poets and artists created works of exquisite beauty, and one of the world's most extraordinary religious traditions took root and flowered. — Stephen Kinzer

It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders. — Simone De Beauvoir

No country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself and this is the risk that the countries of Europe run through misguided altruism. — Tony Abbott

Embracing amnesty and open borders. Sure, other countries have borders (the ones most people are fleeing from), but discussing the possibility of an American border is smeared as racist - the — Greg Gutfeld

The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries. — Paul Theroux

The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our borders. Act fast! — Donald Trump

My aim was to create armaments to protect the borders of my motherland. It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well-known in the world; that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history. — Mikhail Kalashnikov

It is interesting that the rhetoric and some state initiatives of multiculturalism in the West are accompanied by the gathering strength of right wing politics....Everywhere in the West 'immigration,' a euphemistic expression for racist labor and citizenship policies, has become a major election platform....The media and some members of the Canadian intelligentsia speak in terms of the end of 'Canadian culture,' displaying signs of feeling threatened by these 'others,' who are portrayed as an invasive force. In the meantime, Western capital roves in a world without borders, with trade agreements such as GATT and NAFTA ensuring their legal predations, while labour from third world countries is both locked in their national spaces and locked out from Western countries, marked by a discourse of illegality and alienness. — Himani Bannerji

What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? — Ursula K. Le Guin

The division into hundreds of countries whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease and who knows what else, and flourish beyond the twenty-first century. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence. — Brian Cox

There is something almost insane about countries without common borders going to war, something unnatural. — Stephane Audeguy

You don't have to be a brilliant historian to know that in Europe, messing with countries' borders, messing with their self-determination, their ability to choose their own futures, this is extremely dangerous, and that's why I think it is important to stand up to Putin. — David Cameron

The best way to look at countries on a map is like a chalk outline drawn by the police when someone dies what you are seeing with the borders are just outlines of historical crimes past warlords empires its nothing to be loyal to. Have loyalty to reason, to evidence, to ideals not to lines drawn up mostly by criminals. — Stefan Molyneux

I dream, one day the consciousness of the countries will be so high that they will be ashamed to place military on the international borders. All international borders will be place for the tourist, gardeners and cultural celebration. — Amit Ray

Using money in one's attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one's attempt to put an end to xenophobia. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The traditional boundaries between various fields of science are rapidly disappearing and what is more important science does not know any national borders. The scientists of the world are forming an invisible network with a very free flow of scientific information - a freedom accepted by the countries of the world irrespective of political systems or religions ... Great care must be taken that the scientific network is utilized only for scientific purposes - if it gets involved in political questions it loses its special status and utility as a nonpolitical force for development. — Sune Bergstrom

Human dignity is independent of national borders. We must always defend the interests of the poor and the persecuted in other countries. — Kjell Magne Bondevik