Desmond Tutu Quotes

Extensive and organized power over large populations does not suffice to make a nation

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.

Building a state and fostering a national identity take time and good leadership—bold ideas, initiative, and the willingness to compromise.

Nations are not formed in a day, the formation requires years.

A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively.

A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

No nation is formed within a night, one generation's era of even two. A nation can be described as the continuous string of many generations that time, this pitiless, thoughtless sword of nature, separates their physical connections along the course of their history.

A government, to afford the needful protection and exercise proper care for the welfare of a people, must have homogeneity in its constituents. It is this necessity which has divided the human race into separate nations, and finally has defeated the grandest efforts which conquerors have made to give unlimited extent to their domain.

We say that a group united and developed in the royal way, by forces of nature, is a race; a group united and developed by way of might, by human forces, is a state. This, then, is the difference between a race or nationality and a state.

The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being.

Speaking for the nation as a whole entails understanding and feeling the pain, as well as understanding the aspiration of the different cultural, social and political make-up of the nation.

Without a common loyalty to either a state or a church they have nevertheless a vast deal in common.

The nation... doesn't simply need what we have. It needs what we are.

Nonetheless, we continue to be obsessed with finding or inventing a European nation which, as in the nation state, guarantees homogeneity and thus an appropriate form of democracy and centralized government.

The Arab homeland is an indivisible political and economic unity, and all the differences existing between its sons are accidental and spurious, and will pass away with the awakening of Arab consciousness.

It is a hard and difficult thing to do to create a nation

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence.

The country is the people.

A nation is the totality of people who speak the same language.

A nation is a historical group of men of recognizable cohesion, held together by a common enemy.

A sense of nationhood does not prepare a people for instant democracy.

Nationalism usually conquers in the name of a putative folk culture.

A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation

Sedentary agriculture is a necessary structure for state formation—not a sufficient structure but a necessary one..