As we celebrate the 53rd independence day of our nation Nigeria, here is a list of 53 national inspiring quotes for you to meditate on.
1. Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
Frank Herbert

2. A sense of entitlement is a cancerous thought process that is void of gratitude and can be deadly to relationships, businesses, and even nations.
Steve Maraboli

3. Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.
Anonymous

4. Nations survive and advance with brains, wise policies, and manpower — not through speeches and cheap populist agitation.
Anonymous

5. Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest–that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.
Neal Shusterman

6. It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory
Victor Hugo

7. Even as individuals become families and families become communities, and communities become nations, so eventually must the nations draw together in peace.
Marjorie Watts

8. Nations and governments come and go, but people remain, and therefore people are the ultimate foundation of what is real and worthy.
Bryant McGill

9. The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.
Enoch Powell

10. Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it….
George Bernard Shaw

11. If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.
Abraham Lincoln

12. The propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregard the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.
George Washington

13. One person is nothing. Two people are a nation.
Terry Pratchett

14. To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.
Christian D. Larson

15. For enslaving a nation, just kill the conscientious people, the rest can be bought.
M.F. Moonzajer

16. By the fall of 1918, it was clear that a nation’s prosperity, even its very survival, depended on securing a safe, abundant supply of cheap oil.
Albert Marrin

17. Every nation determines its own destiny; the clever the nation, the better the fate!
Mehmet Murat ildan

18. Even if you succeed in study and business, if your nation collapses, then what good is it for?
Hirobumi Ito

19. Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another’s keeping.
Theodore Roosevelt

20. A nation will never be vanished by subjugation or oppression, unless they get used to.
M.F. Moonzajer

21. Before Elijah could raise a nation from the dead, he raised just one dead child.
Lou Engle

22. Nation moves slower than market.
Toba Beta

23. If you fight for yourself, you have awakened your conscience, but if you fight for people you will awaken a nation.
M.F. Moonzajer

24. Misery and poverty of a nation is associated with the conscious of its people not leaders.
M.F. Moonzajer

25. Every rabbit-nation will find its tyrant! Oppressors are the destiny of coward and submissive nations!
Mehmet Murat ildan

26. Show me a clever nation; then I will show you a clever government!
Mehmet Murat ildan

27. A nation is not defined by its borders or the boundaries of its land mass Rather, a nation is defined by adverse people who have been unified by a cause and a value system and who are committed to a vision for the type of society they wish to live in and give to the future generations to come.
Fela Durotoye

28. The nation that honors a dancer more than a scholar is no more a nation.
M.F. Moonzajer

29. A few men’s fight for the survival is stronger than a nation’s fight for the wealth.
M.F. Moonzajer

30. What we need now is a nation of great people who live to positively impact others and build enduring legacies
Fela Durotoye

31. The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground
Winston Churchill

32. If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell
Thomas Merton

33. Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education… no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
Abraham Flexner

34. No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity
Thomas Jefferson

35. We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

36. I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
Woodrow T. Wilson

37. States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them
Niccolo Machiavelli

38. A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

39. The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
Lucretia Mott

40. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

41. Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.
Dale Carnegie

42. No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
Edward R. Murrow

43. The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
Confucius

44. Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
Patrick Henry

45. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.
Kofi Annan

46. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

47. No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger that its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise
Marian Anderson

48. No nation has friends only interests
Charles de Gaulle

49. To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
Ben Okri

50. I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation
Dr. Carl Sagan

51. You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
George Norman Douglas

52. Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.
Margaret Thatcher

53. In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments, when humanity is found collectively in a state of decadence, there always remain those exceptional beings as point of reference.
Augusto Roa

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