Small Nation Quotes & Sayings

We need a leader who can lower taxes, protect small businesses, and increase job creation nationwide. I have no doubt that John McCain appreciates the important role Hispanics play not only in the economy, but in our nation's culture as well
he has a track record with Hispanics for more than 20 years as a senator from Arizona. The American people need a strong leader who has the experience and the judgment to be the next President of the United States, and that man is John McCain. — Katie Barberi

Even though New York is the safest big city in the nation, there are still far too many illegal guns on our streets. Nearly all of them arrive from out of state - and most are sold by a small group of rogue gun dealers who refuse to obey federal laws. — Michael Bloomberg

Denmark is a small, homogenous nation of about 5.5 million people. The United States is a melting pot of more than 315 million people. No question about it, Denmark and the United States are very different countries. — Bernie Sanders

Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a proprietor and a farmer at the same time. The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness; but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no true aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together - surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing. — Carl Sagan

What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported. — Peggy Noonan

2009 was a tough year, but Australia rose to the challenge of the global financial crisis. It shows what can be done when we all join together and work together, governments of all persuasions state, territory and local; businesses large and small; unions and local communities right across the nation. — Kevin Rudd

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman. — John Green

Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning [to] consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul? — Eamon De Valera

Nothing like it had ever been seen in New York. Housetops were covered with "gazers"; all wharves that offered a view were jammed with people. The total British armada now at anchor in a "long, thick cluster" off Staten Island numbered nearly four hundred ships large and small, seventy-three warships, including eight ships of the line, each mounting 50 guns or more. As British officers happily reminded one another, it was the largest fleet ever seen in American waters. In fact, it was the largest expeditionary force of the eighteenth century, the largest, most powerful force ever sent forth from Britain or any nation. — David McCullough

The tribe is whatever we believe it is. If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, then that is what the tribe is. Even though some of the oldest trees here came from warriors of two different tribes, fallen in battle. We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe.
Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman [member of another sentient species]. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation. — Orson Scott Card

When the invasion began, the British public was called upon to 'support' troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no quarrel. 'The ultimate test of our professionalism' is how Commander McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the patient's mouth. — John Pilger

When autumn darkness falls, what we will remember are the small acts of kindness: a cake, a hug, an invitation to talk, and every single rose. These are all expressions of a nation coming together and caring about its people. — Jens Stoltenberg

I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the play thing of one small corner of the world — Sukarno

In truth, the world is now a seamless web from which no nation, large or small, young or old, can disassociate itself. Every attitude and every action of every nation can affect the welfare and security of every other nation around the globe. — Robert Kennedy

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. — Charles Darwin

Family is in essence a small nation, and the nation a large family. In treating his own family with dignity, a ruler learns to govern his nation with dignity — Gene Luen Yang

One nation banking recognises that banks must not be isolated from the rest of the economy. Because banks and small businesses must succeed or fail together, banks must lend to small businesses so we can get the growth and jobs we need for the future. As things stand, that is not happening enough. Lending was down £10.8billion last year. — Ed Miliband

At Guantanamo Bay, we could create a West Berlin, a free small city within the Communist nation that could trade freely with the U.S. and elect its own officials. — Elliott Abrams

With industrialization has come a general depreciation of work. As the price of work has gone up, the value of it has gone down, until it is so depressed that people simply do not want to do it anymore. We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit- a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation. This is explained, of course, by the dullness of the work, by the loss of responsibility for, or credit for, or knowledge of the thing made. What can be the status of the working small farmer in a nation whose motto is a sigh of relief: Thank God it's Friday? — Wendell Berry

We must break out of this mindset in Australia that we are a small nation on the other side of the world from the main, great Western nations. Australia is the twelfth largest economy in the world. We are a not insignificant player in commerce, in geopolitics and we must be in culture as well and we are. — George Brandis

Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort. — Carmen Agra Deedy

It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries
we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
...
Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites. — David Foster Wallace

war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention - an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind - and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don't even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You'll see.
What's more, war is obsolete. Most nations don't make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious "coalition." The earth is small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business. — Ann Jones

We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened. — Margaret Thatcher

Over and over again, we see that when anyone willingly gives whatever resources they have to Him - whether it is nothing more than five smooth stones gathered from a dry streambed or five little loaves of bread and two dried sprats - then God's greater purpose can proceed. Small and insignificant? Undoubtedly. But on the day of decision, everything depended on those five smooth stones - with them, David killed Goliath and saved a nation. — Stephen R. Lawhead

WILSON RAWLS was born on a small farm in the Oklahoma Ozarks. He spent his youth in the heart of the Cherokee nation, prowling the hills and river bottoms with his only companion, an old bluetick hound. Rawls's first writing was done with his fingers in the dust of the country roads and in the sands along the river, and his earliest stories were told to his dog. Not until Rawls's family moved to Muskogee and he could attend high school did he encounter books. Where the Red Fern Grows has become a modern classic and has been made into a widely acclaimed motion picture. — Wilson Rawls

Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England's imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might. — William Manchester

We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches
the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small
the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia
life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam. — Norman Mailer

You cannot tell a poor boy from a small country town on the plains of South Dakota who has had the opportunity to be a teacher, a mayor, a senator, and a vice president, that America is not a nation of promise. — Hubert H. Humphrey

From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Thurs, 09/30/1999 3:42 PM
Subject: If you were Superman ...
... and you could choose any alter ego you wanted, why the hell would you choose to spend your Clark Kent hours - which already suck because you have to wear glasses and you can't fly - at a newspaper? Why not pose as a wealthy playboy like Batman? Or the leader of a small but important nation like Black Panther? Why would you choose to spend your days on deadline, making crap money, dealing with terminally crabby editors? — Rainbow Rowell

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact ... Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this. — Mikhail Bakunin

Throughout our history, the words of the Declaration have inspired immigrants from around the world to set sail to our shores. These immigrants have helped transform 13 small colonies into a great and growing nation of more than 300 people. — George W. Bush

It would be a grand thing for any community, large or small, to set aside even five minutes of the day for serious contemplation. If nothing more were to result than the recognition of such a feeling as "community" it would be a great step forward. If it be true that we have not yet accepted the fact that we are members of "one world," or even of one nation, how much more true it is that we are not even members of the little communities to which we belong. We become more and more atomized, more and more separate and isolate. We hand our problems over to our respective governments, absolving ourselves of duty, conscience, and initiative. We do not believe in personal example, though we profess to worship that great exemplar Jesus the Christ. We hide from the face of reality: it is too terrible, we think. Yet it is we, only we, who have created this hideous world. And it is we who will change it - by changing our own inner vision. — Henry Miller

Today Secretary of State John Kerry visited the small African nation of Djibouti. Or to use the official diplomatic term, he made a Djibouti call. — Conan O'Brien

Every Cuban has a house to live in, no matter how meager. That house is provided by government. Every Cuban who gets sick can go to a doctor or a hospital and get medical attention while 45 million Americans don't have medical insurance. Every Cuban can get education from the kindergarten through college and they don't have to pay. What is Castro doing that we might benefit from-if we are not too arrogant and falsely proud to see what he is doing in a small nation and what we have not been able to do or not been willing to do in the greatest nation on the earth? — Louis Farrakhan

Have you ever had a connection with somebody that makes you feel strange, because it feels kind of cosmic? When I got to the coffee shop I recognized a man like that sitting at a small table in a shaft of morning sunlight squeezing through the other side of the street. As he looked up at a pristine sky, I thought: It seems like this guy's been waiting here for me. — Leo Nation

This nation is notorious for its ability to make or fake anything cheaply. 'Made-in-China' goods now fill homes around the world. But our giant country has a small problem. We can't manufacture the happiness of our people. — Ai Weiwei

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. — Robert Lacey

You happened to find the Tezumen one day and decided, I think I recall your words correctly, that they were 'a bunch of Stone-Age no-hopers sitting around in a swamp being no trouble to anyone', am I right? Whereupon you entered the mind of one of their high priests - I believe at that time they worshipped a small stick - drove him insane and inspired the tribes to unite, terrorise their neighbours and bring forth upon the continent a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men should be taken to the top of ceremonial pyramids and be chopped up with stone knives." The King pulled his notes towards him. "Oh yes, some of them were also to be flayed alive," he added. Quezovercoatl — Terry Pratchett

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them. — Lysander Spooner

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves. — Richard Russo

We have to work sincerely and responsibly to thwart any attempt to divide the Arab nation into small groups, with which foreign countries would deal separately. This would eventually be in the interests of Zionism, which stands behind such policies, formulating the relevant theories and promoting distorted information to world politicians, especially in the West, in order to make them adopt an approach which is harmful to the Arab nation and is even against the legitimate interests of their own countries. — Saddam Hussein

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history. — Drew Gilpin Faust

Maybe in this nation of the flesh,
Distance will hold us together,

as I try to remember her bent low
to the bleeding heart's small petals,
and around us, buds of wild lilies
where once there was a shallow gorge
that dipped into the clearing and horses
claimed the fields; and that one night
she couldn't sleep, she walked

into the same field to behold
the stars she once named for me.
Maybe now I will understand what secrets
she wanted to share that night
while I pretended to sleep.
Years later, we returned to that place
only to discover that the rains
had flooded the field into a lake,
as if all memory was fiction,
as if memory had turned things around. — Eugene Gloria

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it. — Lao-Tzu

There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies. — Alain De Botton

Before peace between the nations, we have to find peace inside that small nation which is our own being. — B.K.S. Iyengar

or creed." These rights included: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education. Roosevelt — H.W. Brands

As a young citizen of India, armed with technology and love for my nation, I realize, a small aim is a crime. — Abdul Kalam

By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respectworthy, and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world. — Mark Twain

All People and things are interdependent. The world has become so small that no nation can solve its problems alone, in isolation from others. That is why I believe we must all cultivate a sense of responsibility based on love and compassion for each other. — Dalai Lama

Looking at the big things that had shaped the nation. Battlefields, factories, declarations, revolutions. Looking for the small things. Birthplaces, clubs, roads, legends. The big things and the small things which were supposed to represent home. I'd found some of them. I — Lee Child

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. — Eric Hoffer

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale. — William Carlos Williams

Many upscale American parents somehow think jobs like their own are part of the nation's natural order. They are not. In Europe, they have already discovered that, and many there have accepted the new small-growth, small-jobs reality. Will we? — Daniel Henninger

The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world's bulwark of liberty. — Steve Buyer

Citizen involvement in democracy triggers criticism and creative attitude, the spirit of competition and transparency as well. This is the dynamic of life that must be confronted, a continuous process of improvement towards better quality of democracy, governance and stronger nation. Neutrality may not make you dizzy, and also nurture your apathetic attitude and skip an opportunity to participate and contribute to change, no matter how small it is. — Toba Beta

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities. — Gore Vidal

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel. — Barbara Tuchman

I am a most unhappy man. I accidentally ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. Our government is no longer based on the freedom of opinion, nor on the conviction and the majority decision, it is now a government which is subjected to the conviction and the compulsion of a small group of dominant men. — Woodrow Wilson

This nation's 23 million small businesses need a budget that reflects their value to the economy. — Solomon Ortiz

This is the truth: We are a nation accustomed to being afraid. If I'm being honest, not just with you but with myself, it's not just the nation, and it's not just something we've grown used to. It's the world, and it's an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve. We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could. — Mira Grant

The tenement house is the enemy of modesty, the enemy of virtue, the enemy of patriotism. Home is where the virtues grow. I would like to see the law so that every home, to a small amount, should be free not only from sale for debts, but should be absolutely free from taxation, so that every man could have a home. Then we will have a nation of patriots. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Ninety-eight percent of all American companies have fewer than 100 employees. Over half of all Americans work for a small business. Small businesses are the backbone of our nation's economy and we must protect this great resource. Helping American small business is part of our movement for change and the end of politics as usual. — Barack Obama

Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. — Herman Melville

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle ... Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed. — George Washington

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scares by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. — Howard Zinn

Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question, a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables. — John Adams

We're a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health
most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country's first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers. The Farm Bill, as of this writing, could aptly be called the Farm Kill, both for its effects on small farmers and for what it does to us, the consumers who are financing it. — Barbara Kingsolver

France is the only nation in which astoundingly small numbers of civilized patrons reside. — Gustave Courbet

The Americans expect great things of me ... If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense. — Antonin Dvorak

Small businesses are vital contributors to our economy. They are the economic engine that is creating jobs, exploring innovation, and expanding opportunities for Americans in every community across the Nation. — Allyson Schwartz

An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted. — Ameen Rihani

2. It is admitted that when in recent times the appearance of our Saviour Jesus Christ had become known to all men there immediately made its appearance a new nation; a nation confessedly not small, and not dwelling in some corner of the earth, but the most numerous and pious of all nations, indestructible and unconquerable, because it always receives assistance from God. This nation, thus suddenly appearing at the time appointed by the inscrutable counsel of God, is the one which has been honored by all with the name of Christ. — Eusebius

It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd. — Norman Mailer

Denmark is a small nation of five million people, but our economy is completely dependent on our commercial fleet. Every family has some connection to it. — Tobias Lindholm

A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry. A society in which the capacity for warm appreciation of excellence atrophies will find that its capacity for excellence diminishes. Happiness, too, diminishes as the appreciation of excellence diminishes. That is no small loss, least of all to a nation in which the pursuit of happiness was endorsed in the founding moment. — George F. Will

We shall always be a small minority in the world, but, when a small nation accomplishes something with its limited means, what it achieves has an immense and exceptional value, like the widow's mite. It is a deliberate and discerning love of a nation that appeals to me, not the indiscriminate love that assumes everything to be right because it bears a national label. Love of one's own nation should not entail non-love of other nations. Institutions by themselves are not enough. — Tomas Garrigue Masaryk

The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then become pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own. — Vasily Grossman

We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries - we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? — David Foster Wallace

Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims? — John O. Brennan

The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy.

A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains.

Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop. — John Wood

camp: "If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage." Goebbels acted immediately — Erik Larson

The country is now universally recognised as a nation on the move and takes its place amongst the successful economies in the region. The future potential is enormous but the country's destiny is in our hands. The time has come to move from small increments to bold, large initiatives. The time has come to stretch the envelope and set goals which were earlier not seen to be possible. The time has come for performance to be measured and for allocated funds of the government to reach the people for whom they were intended. — Ratan Tata

As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation. — William Bradford

Small business in America is what fuels the American economy. We need more small business to assist us in creating a great nation and in creating more jobs. It's this frontier that is endless in terms of opportunity and potential. — Debbi Fields

All combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community. — George Washington

I am the son of a small and far-away nation and the other laureates have all come from different countries from all over the world and we all were equally received here with signs of sympathy. — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

There is no Nation however small which had the right to set itself free, that has not rescued itself from the dishonour of obeying the Prince imposed by an enemy in the hour of victory. — Napoleon Bonaparte

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests. — George Washington

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. — Neville Chamberlain

If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit. — Paul Beatty

A very small percentage of those in the church stand behind a pulpit or sport certain kinds of identifiable clothing. The actual leadership roster of the church includes disciples ministering in every arena of life, in business, law, medicine, education, the arts, sciences, government, and religion. The objective of Jesus's church-growth strategy was not to build a single, behemoth social institution with a limited set of ordained authorities. Instead, his Spirit was to be poured out on all flesh to effect a widening, deepening base of influence within every nation, worldview, and social institution. — Dallas Willard

It was about a year ago when I first made contact with members of the British Foreign Office. I volunteered my services and privileged information to a foreign power. Which is effectively treason, or would be, except that I regard it as pure patriotism. You see, Clara, I no longer recognize the Germany I love. I see these brutes strong-arming a small nation like Austria, and now threatening Czechoslovakia, because they can and because no one will stop them. I see them running riot with the rule of law - Germany, whose legal system is the greatest in the world, which has always stood for justice and right. And when I see this gang of thugs flooding the streets of my beloved country with tides of blood, I feel hatred swelling inside me. Damn Himmler and Heydrich and all the other sadists. I hate this false Germany, as much as I love the real Germany. And I intend to do something about it. — Jane Thynne

Sarah (Winnemucca) is best known for her 1883 autobiography, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Theirs Claims, the first memoir writen and published by a Native American woman. Her story begins; 'I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time. I was a very small child when the first white people came to our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued to do so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming. — Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

The way I figure it, everyone gets one miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a nobel prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But If you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will happen to each of us. — John Green

This we know: in order to survive in unfavorable circumstances, a small nation has to adapt. — Mariusz Szczygiel

One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and the unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country. — Howard Zinn