No nation is ever ready for independence. How many Western states, including the United States of America, were ready for independence.
We have to get tough with the Russians. They don't know how to behave. They are like bulls in a china shop. They are only 25 years old. We are over 100 and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to behave.
Nations, which in later periods of their history became eminent for civil wisdom and justice, had, perhaps, in a former age, paroxysms of lawless disorder.
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.
There comes a time in the life of a nation, as in the life of an individual, when it must face great responsibilities, whether it will or no. We have now reached that time. We cannot avoid facing the fact that we occupy a new place among the people of the world.
When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower.
No nation as young as America can be expected to become immediately a power in the arts.”
Acceptance by government of a dissident press is a measure of the maturity of a nation.
I am one year older than Nigeria at 51. In a human life, 51 might be old. But it is very young for a nation. By that, I mean a Nigeria conscious of itself as a nation.
I don't think that Americans are ungrateful, not at all. But I do think that we are a young country, and we have a lot to learn.
The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
A great country acknowledges it's mistakes.
