Quotes about homeland
page 47

Calvin Coolidge photo
Niall Ferguson photo
Maynard James Keenan photo

“Every now and then, you get people who tend to forget what this country is about, which is a melting pot of races and cultures and freedom of speech.”

Maynard James Keenan (1964) musician

George Varga (October 25, 2001) "The Tool Man: Blistering band's frontman puts his mind to the world's problems", The San Diego Union-Tribune, p. 4.

Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Thurgood Marshall photo

“Jacques Spex had explained to Ieyasu the methods of Spain and Portugal and in 1612 Henrick Brower presented to the Shogun a memorandum on Spanish and Portuguese methods of conquest. In the time of the second Tokugawa Shogun (Hidetada) the European nations were themselves denouncing each other's imperialist intentions. The Japanese converts had, as elsewhere, shown that their sympathies were with their foreign mentors and for this they had to pay a very heavy price. The Christian rebellion of 1637 in Shembara disclosed this danger to the Shogun. It took a considerable army and a costly campaign to put down the revolt which was said to have received support from the Portuguese. The Japanese were also fully informed of the activities of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spaniards and the English in the islands of the Pacific especially in the Philippines, the Moluccas and Java ‑ and these had taught them the necessity of dealing with the foreigners firmly and of denying them an opportunity to gain a foothold on Japanese territory. In 1615 the Japanese sent a special spy to the southern regions to report on the activities of the Europeans there. They were strengthened by the information that reached them in 1622 of a Spanish plan to invade Japan itself. By the beginning of the seventeenth century Spain had consolidated her position in the Philippines, where she maintained a considerable naval force. Japan was the only area in the Pacific which Spain could attack without interfering with Portuguese claims or the Papal distribution of the world which in her own interests she was bound to uphold. It seemed natural to the Spaniards that they should undertake this conquest. The reaction of the Shogunate was sharp and decisive. All Spaniards in Japan were ordered to be deported, the firm policy of eliminating the converts was put into effect and a few years later the country was closed to the Western nations.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Toshio Shiratori photo

“The most serious menace to Japan comes from the Soviet Union. Numerous European countries will eventually embrace Communism. So will China and India if we just watch them with folded arms.”

Toshio Shiratori (1887–1949) Japanese politician

Letter to Hachiro Arita, November 1935. Quoted in "Beacon Across Asia: Biography of Subhas Chandra Bose" - Page 122 - by Subhas Chandra Bose, Sisir Kumar Bose, Narayan Gopal Jog - 1998.

Nathanael Greene photo
Tadeusz Kościuszko photo
Guy Debord photo
Stephen Fry photo
Gabriele Münter photo
George Gershwin photo
Mao Zedong photo

“In ordinary circumstances, contradictions among the people are not antagonistic. However, if they are not handled properly, or if we relax our vigilance and lower our guard, antagonism may arise. In a socialist country, a development of this kind is usually only a localized and temporary phenomenon. The reason is that the system of exploitation of man by man has been abolished and the interests of the people are the same.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 在一般情况下,人民内部的矛盾不是对抗性的。但是如果处理得不适当,或者失去警觉,麻痹大意,也可能发生对抗。这种情况,在社会主义国家通常只是局部的暂时的现象。这是因为社会主义国家消灭了人剥削人的制度,人民的利益在根本上是一致的。

Ezra Pound photo
R. Venkataraman photo

“In a healthy democracy both the ruling party and the opposition have a responsibility to the country and surely the people will judge them in the discharge of that responsibility.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, P.184.

Thaddeus Stevens photo
Kamal Haasan photo
Joe Biden photo

“Ties between our two countries are literally, literally unbreakable.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

addressing the 2010 General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America on relations between the United States of America and the State of Israel, 2010-11-07, in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America
Israel Resumption of Building Settlements Could Derail Peace Talks, PBS Newshour, 2010-11-08, 2012-07-01 http://newshour-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2010/11/08/20101108_mideast1.mp3,
Israel Resumption of Building Settlements Could Derail Peace Talks, PBS Newshour, 2010-11-08, 2012-07-01 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec10/mideast1_11-08.html,
Biden reaffirms U.S. support for Israel in speech to Jewish group, CNN, 2010-11-07, 2012-07-01 http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-07/politics/louisiana.biden.israel_1_vice-president-joe-biden-peace-talks-israel, (Misquotation omits the second utterance of the word “literally”.)
2010s

Nelson Mandela photo
Christopher Isherwood photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“Th. Jefferson returns his thanks to Dr. De La Motta for the eloquent discourse on the Consecration of the Synagogue of Savannah, which he has been so kind as to send him. It excites in him the gratifying reflection that his country has been the first to prove to the world two truths, the most salutary to human society, that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is "divided we stand, united, we fall."”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Thomas Jefferson to Jacob De La Motta, September 1, 1820. Manuscript Division, Papers of Thomas Jefferson. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/loc/madison.html For the background of the letter see "Thomas Jefferson's Letter on Religious Freedom" Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun from the Center for Jewish History, New York City, New York. http://sephardicoralhistory.org/education/essays.php?action=show&id=19
1820s

Peter Kenneth photo

“Good legacies form a stepping-stone of future leadership and the foundation of development in the country”

Peter Kenneth (1965) politician

While addressing mourners during the funeral of Martha Nyokabi, who was a District Officer at Kigoro in Gatanga district. Kenya deserves good leaders, says Kenneth, nation.co.ke, 2012, 11 August 2012 http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/-/1064/1476418/-/9fxys5/-/index.html,

David Lloyd George photo
Friedrich Engels photo
William Ellery Channing photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“In a capitalist country foreign trade, like any other trade, is carried on by individual firms, and individual firms cannot be guided in their activities by "global"considerations, by concern with the impact of their operations on the economy as a whole.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Four, Standstill and Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, II, p. 110

Mahdi Akef photo

“The Arab and Islamic countries suffer from severe backwardness, and the Western world wants to make them even more backward.”

Mahdi Akef (1928–2017) Egyptian Islamist

Arab and Islamic Countries Should Obtain Nuclear Technology "For Military Purposes" http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1140.htm (June 2006)

Calvin Coolidge photo

“Undoubtedly one of the most important provisions in the preparation for national defense is a proper and sound selective service act. Such a law ought to give authority for a very broad mobilization of all the resources of the country, both persons and materials. I can see some difficulties in the application of the principle, for it is the payment of a higher price that stimulates an increased production, but whenever it can be done without economic dislocation such limits ought to be established in time of war as would prevent so far as possible all kinds of profiteering. There is little defense which can be made of a system which puts some men in the ranks on very small pay and leaves others undisturbed to reap very large profits. Even the income tax, which recaptured for the benefit of the National Treasury alone about 75 per cent of such profits, while local governments took part of the remainder, is not a complete answer. The laying of taxes is, of course, in itself a conscription of whatever is necessary of the wealth of the country for national defense, but taxation does not meet the full requirements of the situation. In the advent of war, power should be lodged somewhere for the stabilization of prices as far as that might be possible in justice to the country and its defenders.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

Gleb Pavlovsky photo

“"Other Russia" is a workshop of picking out pick-locks to the real Russia. Have a read of their texts. Only one question is solved there — how to overthrow Putin's system, i. e. to leave all without the country. ("«Другая Россия»”

Gleb Pavlovsky (1951) Russian political scientist

это цех подбора отмычек к реальной России. Почитайте их тексты. Там решается только один вопрос — как опрокинуть систему Путина, то есть оставить всех без страны.")

Winston S. Churchill photo
George W. Bush photo
John Constable photo

“The landscapes of Ruysdael present the greatest possible contrast to those of Claude, showing how powerfully, from the most opposite directions, genius may command our homage. In Claude's pictures, with scarcely an exception, the sun ever shines. Ruysdael, on the contrary, delighted in, and has made delightful to our eyes, those solemn days, peculiar to his country and to ours, when without storm, large rolling clouds scarcely permit a ray of sunlight to break the shades of the forest.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from 'The History of Landscape Painting,' third lecture, Royal Institution (9 June 1836), from notes taken by C.R. Leslie; as quoted in: 'A brief history of weather in European landscape art', John E. Thornes, in Weather Volume 55, Issue 10 Oct. 2000, p. 366-67
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Marc Randazza photo

“Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy. Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.
We should not, therefore, confuse India's Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognized as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.
Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?
One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Tipu Sultan - Villain or Hero (1993)

Licio Gelli photo
Anastas Mikoyan photo
Willa Cather photo

“We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 12 (6 September 1902) near Marseilles, France.

S.L.A. Marshall photo
John Adams photo

“While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Oaths in this country are as yet universally considered as sacred obligations. That which you have taken, and so solemnly repeated on that venerable ground, is an ample pledge of your sincerity and devotion to your country and its government.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull http://books.google.com/books?id=E2kFAAAAQAAJ&dq=editions%3AVsZcW99fWPgC&pg=PA265#v=onepage&q&f=false (New York, 1848), pp 265-6. There are some differences in the version that appeared in The Works of John Adams (Boston, 1854), vol. 9, pp. 228-9 http://books.google.com/books?id=PZYKAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA228#v=onepage&q&f=false, most notably the words "or gallantry" instead of "and licentiousness".
1790s

Rajiv Gandhi photo

“Instead of understanding the crisis facing the country and helping the country, the opposition wants to weaken the country by its deeds.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In his address to the party workers on 12 November 1984 to spoil the machinations of terrorist, when he was elected to the post of the President of the Congress Party, Meena Agrawal in “Rajiv Gandhi”, P.74
Quote

Cormac McCarthy photo
Derryn Hinch photo
Neil Peart photo
Abdul Halim of Kedah photo

“Grab this opportunity for us to visit one another. Strengthen the fraternal relationship among the various races found in Malaysia. May our country will continue be peace and prosper.”

Abdul Halim of Kedah (1927–2017) King of Malaysia

2016 Hari Raya Aidilfitri Message https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s92hqTf3Dd0, 5/7/2016

Doris Haddock photo
Willem Roelofs photo

“I have experienced this country of the great mountains [Switzerland] superb!…. [but] I positively believe that nature, most appropriate to be reproduced in painting, is the modest landscape which seems just ordinarily and very insignificant. (translation from original French: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original French text:) J'ai trouvé ce pays de grandes montaignes superbe!.. .[mais] Je crois positivement que la nature la plus faite pour être reproduite en peinture, est le paysage modeste et qui parait ordinarement le plus insignificant.
In a letter, 1894; as cited in Willem Roelofs 1822-1897 De Adem der natuur, ed. Marjan van Heteren & Robert-Jan te Rijdt; Thoth, Bussum, 2006, p. 19 - ISBN13 978 90 6868 432 2
late quote of Roelofs, in a letter of his travel with his (painter-)sons to Switzerland
1890's

John Kass photo

“Who cares if it's legal? I don't care if it's legal. Slavery was legal once too, and not just in America, but just about every other country in the world. The powerful have always legalized their subjugation of the less powerful.”

John Kass (1956) American journalist

"Evil with salad and a nice red" http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-kass-planned-parenthood-met-0719-20150719-column.html (19 July 2015), Chicago Tribune, Illinois

Alain Finkielkraut photo

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

John Updike photo
Warren Buffett photo

“We're going to move a lot of crude (oil) in this country, and we have to learn how to do it very safely.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

http://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/buffett:-moving-oil-by-rail-safely-is-a-major-industry-concern-279336 "Buffett: Moving Oil By Rail Safely Is A Major Industry Concern" Investing.com (24 April 2014)
Quotes from the press

Robert Mugabe photo

“That isn't true. Zimbabwe is the most highly developed country in Africa. After South Africa, I want to see another country as highly developed. [We have 14 universities and a literacy rate of over 90%, the highest in Africa. ] And yet they talk about us as a fragile state. We have a bumper harvest, not only maize, but also tobacco and many other crops. We are not a poor country. If anyone wants to call us fragile, they can. You can also call America fragile.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

When asked by Anton du Plessis of the Institute for Security Studies if he agreed that Zimbabwe was a failed state, as quoted by Carien du Plessis in Mugabe: Zim 'is the most highly developed country in Africa after SA' http://www.news24.com/Africa/Zimbabwe/mugabe-zim-is-the-most-highly-developed-country-in-africa-after-sa-20170504, News 24 (4 May 2017)
2010s

Enoch Powell photo
Henry Campbell-Bannerman photo
Kancha Ilaiah photo

“The dalit's main agenda is not reservations. My way of equality is English education. Even if 10% of our children got English education, the intellectual field would have changed. This country would have changed. My hope is education, not reservation — and I emphasize, English education”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

Quoted in at The Times Of India (15 February 2013) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/interviews/Kancha-Ilaiah-Even-if-10-dalit-children-got-English-education-India-would-change/articleshow/18503625.cms.

Abd al-Karim Qasim photo
Thomas More photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“I see the carnage that NAFTA has caused, I see the carnage. It's been horrible. … It's a suicidal pact for our country. And you know I've watched for years.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, August, Speech at rally in Wilmington, North Carolina (August 9, 2016)

Emma Watson photo

“It was unbelievable seeing me as an action figure! In a few months, toddlers all around the country will be biting my head off!”

Emma Watson (1990) British actress and model

Profile on BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1996879

Michelle Obama photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
İsmail Enver photo

“The Armenians had a fair warning of what would happen to them in case they joined our enemies. Three months ago I sent for the Armenian Patriarch and I told him that if the Armenians attempted to start a revolution or to assist the Russians, I would be unable to prevent mischief from happening to them. My warning produced no effect and the Armenians started a revolution and helped the Russians. You know what happened at Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs against government buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems. We knew that they were planning uprisings in other places. You must understand that we are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and that we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back. We have got to prevent this no matter what means we have to resort to. It is absolutely true that I am not opposed to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their intelligence and industry, and I should like nothing better than to see them become a real part of our nation. But if they ally themselves with our enemies, as they did in the Van district, they will have to be destroyed. I have taken pains to see that no injustice is done; only recently I gave orders to have three Armenians who had been deported returned to their homes, when I found that they were innocent. Russia, France, Great Britain, and America are doing the Armenians no kindness by sympathizing with and encouraging them. I know what such encouragement means to a people who are inclined to revolution. When our Union and Progress Party attacked Abdul Hamid, we received all our moral encouragement from the outside world. This encouragement was of great help to us and had much to do with our success. It might similarly now help the Armenians and their revolutionary programme. I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they would give up all their efforts to oppose the present government and become law-abiding citizens. We now have this country in our absolute control and we can easily revenge ourselves on any revolutionists.”

İsmail Enver (1881–1922) Turkish military officer and a leader of the Young Turk revolution

Quoted in "Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the Present" - Page 188 - by Matthew J. Gibney, Randall Hansen - Social Science - 2005.

Joseph Warton photo
Ha-Joon Chang photo
Muhammad bin Tughluq photo
Gary Johnson photo
Gjorge Ivanov photo
Vincent Massey photo

“In opening and conquering a country great and wild and rich - a country indeed not yet fully known or conquered - we have still to learn more about ourselves and each other.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address to the Canadian Club of Ottawa, December 18, 1952
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“A fourth enduring strand of policy has been to help improve the life of man. From the Marshall Plan to this very moment tonight, that policy has rested on the claims of compassion, and the certain knowledge that only a people advancing in expectation will build secure and peaceful lands. This year I propose major new directions in our program of foreign assistance to help those countries who will help themselves. We will conduct a worldwide attack on the problems of hunger and disease and ignorance. We will place the matchless skill and the resources of our own great America, in farming and in fertilizers, at the service of those countries committed to develop a modern agriculture. We will aid those who educate the young in other lands, and we will give children in other continents the same head start that we are trying to give our own children. To advance these ends I will propose the International Education Act of 1966. I will also propose the International Health Act of 1966 to strike at disease by a new effort to bring modern skills and knowledge to the uncared—for, those suffering in the world, and by trying to wipe out smallpox and malaria and control yellow fever over most of the world during this next decade; to help countries trying to control population growth, by increasing our research—and we will earmark funds to help their efforts. In the next year, from our foreign aid sources, we propose to dedicate $1 billion to these efforts, and we call on all who have the means to join us in this work in the world.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Ilana Mercer photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter, Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1821: ME 15-341, as quoted in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore, A&C Black (2012, reprint), p. 87 : ISBN 1408835800, 9781408835807, and Federal Jurisdiction, Form #05.018, Sovereignty Education and Defense Ministry (2012)
1820s

“I am running because I love my country and Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are ruining it. It is time to take our country back and I am asking you to join me in this fight.”

Scott Ashjian (1963) American businessman

[Smith, John L., Critics play whack-a-mole with Tea Party of Nevada candidate, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1B, March 23, 2010]

Akihito photo
Gustav Stresemann photo

“The question poses itself whether we should look on with folded arms while those Germans of the Baltic countries who, despite all the persecution, all the misery and all the difficulties have stuck to the German language and German culture, are being slaughtered…It would be incomprehensible if we, who have exerted ourselves for the freedom of ethnically foreign nations, failed to let our hearts beat first of all for the Balts, who are our own flesh and blood…If to-day you go to Riga or Mitau, you will be confronted by such a pure, unadulterated Germanism that sometimes you would wish it could be united with Germany…When, in addition to Courland, we have also occupied Latvia and Estonia, then I hope that the day will also come when this old German soil will lie under the protection of the great Reich…This does not mean annexation of these territories. But it does mean a free Baltic in close dependence on Germany, under our military, moral, political, and cultural protection. I think it would be one of the finest aims of this world war if we could merge this piece of loyal Germanism with ourselves as intimately as it desires to be merged…The Baltic Germans have completely preserved their German culture: a shining example for the Americanized grandchildren of German grandfathers.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Speech in the Reichstag (19 February 1918), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), pp. 149-150.
1910s

William Harcourt photo
Rand Paul photo

“Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/04/03/rand_paul_foreign_aid_goes_from_poor_people_in_rich_countries_to_rich_people_in_poor_countries.html, University of Kentucky, 3-27-2013.
2010s

Samuel R. Delany photo
Hugh Gaitskell photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo
Clement Attlee photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
François Mitterrand photo

“In such countries, genocide is not too important…”

François Mitterrand (1916–1996) 21st President of the French Republic

Comments about Rwanda attributed to President Mitterrand by Philip Gourevitch in "Reversing the Reversals of War," The New Yorker, 26 April 1999.
Attributed

George S. Patton photo

“I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Spoken by George C. Scott in the film Patton.
Variants:
No man ever won a war by dying for his country. Wars were won by making the other poor bastard die for his.
You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.
War is not meant to be you dying for your country-it is by making the other bastard die for his.
Misattributed

Wesley Clark photo
Emma Goldman photo
Lewis Black photo
Vladimir Mayakovsky photo

“I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood –
what then?,
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor

"Back Home!", first version (1926); translation from Patricia Blake (ed.) The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) p. 36

Josefa Iloilo photo

“We are called here at a critical moment of our country.”

Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji

Opening address to the Great Council of Chiefs meeting, 27 July 2005 (excerpts)

Hovhannes Bagramyan photo

“What's bad about my biography? My father was a worker, my brothers, too, and I have always honestly served my country.”

Hovhannes Bagramyan (1897–1982) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad" - Page 112 - by Harrison E. Salisbury - History - 2003

Steven Mnuchin photo

“First of all, I think the United States is the greatest country in the world to invest in. And we see that. And we see that money is pouring into the United States for those reasons. So I think we're really going to be focused on economic growth and creating jobs. And that's really going to be the priority.”

Steven Mnuchin (1962) 77th and current United States Secretary of the Treasury

As quoted in "Trump Cabinet picks: Ross and Mnunchin's exclusive interview with CNBC's 'Squawk Box'" at CNBC (30 November 2016) https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/30/trump-cabinet-picks-ross-and-mnunchins-exclusive-interview-with-cnbc.html

Bowe Bergdahl photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
John F. Kennedy photo