“Nations, like men, have their infancy.”
On the Study and Use of History, letter 4 (1752)
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Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke 10
English politician and Viscount 1678–1751Related quotes
“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”
“Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be.”
The Almost Perfect State (1921)
Context: Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against them, are not easy things to do.
Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), "Jesus' fraternal relocation of God", p. 79.
“National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.”
Source: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-35 (1955), p. 277
“There is nothing like having a United Nations at home.”
Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015
“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”
Book VI, ch. iii
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
“Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.”
“There is nothing so unreasonable as infancy, excepting the maturer stages of life.”
Fated to be Free (1875)