Never yet was a nation born that did not begin in the spirit, pass to the heart and the mind, and then take an outer form in the world of men.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.
Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.
I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.
The whole world is a man's birthplace.
In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.
A nation is a totality of men united through community of fate into a community of character.
The great men of a nation reach out to all mankind. They are unifying, not divisive; internationally conciliating and still great nationally.
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