Book of Isaiah Quotes

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

We could raise prodigious cities and create nations, and explore the universe.

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.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth.

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

Whatever the framers … intended, there is no reason to believe that they possessed the best insights or ultimate wisdom as to the meaning of their words for subsequent generations ... Words do not have fixed meanings.

I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.

History is in motion, and those moving with it are so caught up that they cannot always see its broad outlines

One step forward, two steps back ... It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

When we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution ... we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in what was said a hundred years ago.

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us.

Growth is a result. It is not a policy.

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.

Give me the map of any country, its configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and the whole of its physical geography; give me its natural productions, its flora, its zoology, &c., and I pledge myself to tell you, a priori, what will be the quality of man in history:—not accidentally, but necessarily; not at any particular epoch, but in all;

There is no instant step from disorder to order.

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

Nation building cannot be done on the cheap.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

Nigeria was once a land of great hope and progress, a nation with immense resources at its disposal. But the Biafran War changed the course of Nigeria. In my view, it was a cataclysmic experience that changed the history of Africa.

The technical progress of the last half-century has transformed our country in countless ways. But, fortunately, we have continued to keep our own customs and culture. It is up to us now, more than ever, in shaping our new country, to achieve a consolidation, in which neither the rapid progress of recent years, nor the age-old customs of our forefathers, are lost or diminished, but rather fused into a new national characteristic in which the best is preserved, while the worst may be thrown away.

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.

The relationship of a people to their homeland is crucial. A people will naturally have a difficult time maintaining a common cultural identity without a collective presence in their homeland. Only in its homeland can a people develop economically, culturally and socially as a homogeneous entity. In fact, this is the crux of why some of us consider it necessary to struggle to live in our homeland.

...The right to self-determination refers to the right of a given population (usually a nation) to create its own future more or less free from external coercion, but within the limits of the historical realities with which it is faced.