Geopolitical Boundaries Quotes

A geographical division... is a most fatal of all divisions, as no authority will submit to be governed by a majority acting merely on a geographical principle.

Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here... is France, and we're in the middle - that's my map of Africa.

As far as Malaysia is concerned, Singapore is a foreign country.

First, to begin with, Mexico is North American; the one that is using wrong the term is United States. United States is not North America. North America is Mexico, United States, and Canada.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

The frontier of America is on the Rhine.

No man is an island; but some are peninsulas.

We've got have a country.

A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.

The United States are a miracle: the division between two states is sometimes a river or a mountain, and sometimes it's a straight line. But nobody says, "That tree really belongs in South Carolina. I shan't do anything about it now, I'll get it back later." I shall go after I am here to London and after that to Potsdam, where Comrade Stalin, Mr Churchill and Harry Truman divided up Europe; and what we see now is the result of that. The Americans would have accepted it. But Europeans don't accept anything.

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.

We were once told that the aeroplane had "abolished frontiers"; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.

The best way to look at countries on a map is like a chalk outline drawn by the police when someone dies what you are seeing with the borders are just outlines of historical crimes past warlords empires its nothing to be loyal to. Have loyalty to reason, to evidence, to ideals not to lines drawn up mostly by criminals.

Maybe we need to start with the rethinking of what is "west" and what is "non-west." It seems to me that there are any number of populations who already cross that divide, and we could probably point to several existing states that belong exclusively neither to one category nor to the other. Do we use these terms to designate geographical realities, geopolitical ones, or perhaps sites of power, exploitation, orientalism that move through space and time in ways that have to be tracked historically.

Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.

Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere.

Just a few years ago India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were one country. Actually, we were many countries if you count the princely states.... Then the British drew a line, and now we're three countries, two of them pointing nukes at each other - the radical Hindu bomb and the radical Muslim bomb.

I don't believe that just because one person is born on one side of some imaginary line and another person is born on the other side means that a lot of people should be getting screwed through no fault of their own.

I don't see much of a future for this planet. I think it's a cursed planet. The boundaries we've drawn between nations and the profit motive - those two factors have, in my opinion, brought us to the point where almost nothing can stop the utter destruction of the environment and all our earthly life-support systems.

I think there is something about countries and nations that is hard to define. And, in fact, that's probably why we create such massive boundaries - because it's so slippery where they begin and where they end.

I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.

Boundaries have no existence save on charts or in small minds. Nature does not draw lines.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

It is well to remember, however, that the geographical extent of the Monroe Doctrine has never been precisely delimited. Monroe spoke of "the American Continents" or, in other words, North and South America. Does this wholly exclude Antarctica, and if not, what part of that region is included?

Where a country lies is a subjective decision and only in part a product of its own desire. Much, if not most, is determined by what others believe about it.