C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Nation
Nations, as well as individuals, are mortal.
Nations, like individuals, interest us in their growth.
Like men, nations are purified and strengthened by trials.
When nations are to perish in their sins, ’tis in the Church the leprosy begins.
Nationality is the aggregated individuality of the greatest men of the nation.
Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man, and men are the particles of which it is composed.
No nation can be destroyed while it possesses a good home life.
The greater number of nations, as of men, are only impressible in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old.
Nations, like individuals, are powerful in the degree that they command the sympathies of their neighbors.
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
In the youth of a State, arms do flourish; in the middle age of a State, learning; and then both of them together for a time; in the declining age of a State, mechanical arts and merchandise.
A nation’s character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation’s inheritance. They awe foreign powers; they arouse and animate our own people.
In the life of a nation ideas are not the only things of value. Sentiment also is of great value; and the way to foster sentiment in a people, and to develop it in the young, is to have a well-recorded past, and to be familiar with it.
A people that studies its own past, and rejoices in the nation’s proud memories, is likely to be a patriotic people, the bulwark of law, and the courageous champion of right in the hour of need.
Whatever of true glory has been won by any nation of the earth; whatever great advance has been made by any nation in that which constitutes a high Christian civilization, has been always at the cost of sacrifice; has cost the price marked upon it in God’s inventory of national good.
It may be too much to expect that nations should be governed in their relations towards each other by the precepts of Christian morality, but surely it is not too much to ask that they should conform to the code of courtesy and good breeding recognized among gentlemen in the intercourse of social life.