National Character Quotes

The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.

The English have no exaulted sentiments. They can all be bought.

The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.

Winston Churchill used to say that we, Americans, try every other option before we finally do the right thing. After everything else is exhausted we eventually do the right thing and I think that's true for Congress as well. And it's important for Americans to remember that politics has always been messy.

The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

Love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism.

The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony.

If the Commander-in-Chief will look beyond the defence forces, he will discover that the real India is not military but peace-loving.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle.

In America, we hurry-which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!

We proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things and tackling our biggest challenges.

Americans are a wonderful people: They will always do the right thing--after exhausting every other possible alternative.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

You can always rely on America to do the right thing -- once it has exhausted the alternatives.

There is one thing about Englishmen, they won't fix anything till it's just about totally ruined. You couldn't get the English to fix anything at the start. No! They like to sit and watch it grow worse. Then, when it just looks like the whole thing has gone up Salt Creek, why, the English jump in and rescue it.

If you want to know who we are, who America is, how we respond to evil-that's it: selflessly, compassionately, unafraid.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before.

Everybody has always underrated the Russians. They keep their own secrets alike from foe and friends.

Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a Nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day.

Give up the awful disease that is creeping into our national blood, that idea of ridiculing everything, that loss of seriousness. Give that up. Be strong and have this Shraddha, and everything else is bound to follow.

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence.

The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths - they haven't any.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

The sentiment of national honor is never more than half extinguished in the French. It takes only a spark to re-kindle it.

If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.

What kind of people do they [the Japanese] think we are?

In the English character, the "give and take" policy, the business principle of the trader, is principally inherent.

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom.

A nation is not to be judged by its weaklings called the wicked, as they are only the weeds which lag behind, but by the good, the noble, and the pure, who indicate the national life current flowing clear and vigorous.

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

It is by no means necessary that a great nation should always stand at the heroic level. But no nation has the root of greatness in it unless in time of need it can rise to the heroic mood.

Russian may seem narrow-minded, impudent, or even stupid people, but can only pray for those who are against them.

I think perhaps we manage our revolutions much more quietly in this country.

It is a curious fact about British Islanders, who hate drill and have not been invaded for nearly a thousand years, that as danger comes nearer and grows they become progressively less nervous; when it is imminent the are fierce, when it is mortal they are fearless.

Nothing short of self-respect and that justice which is essential to a national character ought to involve us in war.

There are no people in the world who are so slow to develop hostile feelings against a foreign country as the Americans, and no people who, once estranged, are more difficult to win back.