Colin Powell Quotes

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

I believe there should be no arbitrary date set for withdrawal and yet no permanent, unending deployment. No cut and run, yet measured progress in helping a people who want to be free without an illusion of overnight success.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extremes, and by asserting our independence, become of sufficient consequence in their eyes to merit a closer study than they have hitherto accorded us.

Each nation has to find its own path and follow that path at its own speed.

… half-formed pseudo nations

Our colonies are great and growing nationalities.

Above all, I had to fight for the image of the Kingdom, which meant standing up to the Americans to save our country from appearing an American dependency.

American interests dictate that we teach other peoples to govern themselves.

The Armenians are a race like the Jews: they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character. Armenians and Greeks have many flaws and deficiencies of character that do not fit them for self government.

From Kurdistan to Catalonia to Scotland, from Syria to Chechnya to South Sudan, from indigenous communities in the Andean nations to tribal communities in sub-Saharan Africa, many people are shifting their primary political identities away from the nation-states in which they lived for many generations.

Nationalism is the most powerful force on earth today.

There is no power on earth that can undo Pakistan

...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.

Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.

I keep wondering who defends Quebec identity: who defends sovereignty, the right of the people to express themselves freely.

Nationalism is a central ideology for people who are trying to establish their own states in which they can play a dominant role.

What I believe is this: Catalunya is not Spain, it is something else and you have to feel it.

Israel and Rwanda both play an active part in international organizations, including the U.N., but I think it's true that our unique experiences as nations have shaped a fierce independence that we will not relinquish.

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

The history and national interest of Rwanda and the Rwandan people dictate our national orientation.

Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.