Nation

Nation

A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government (for example the inhabitants of a sovereign state) irrespective of their ethnic make-up. The word nation can more specifically refer to people of North American Indians, such as the Cherokee Nation that prefer this term over the contested term tribe.

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Famous quotes containing the word nation:

    A nation rushing hastily to and fro, busily employed in idleness.
    Phaedrus (c. 1st century A.D.)

    It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war—when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.
    Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)

    We enunciate a grand principle, then we are timid and begin restricting its application. We are a nation of infidels to principle.
    Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 7, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)