"Nations are the wealth of mankind"

Here is a powerful quote given by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during his Nobel Lecture of 1970:

"Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention."