A

James Bond: If you can't trust a Swiss banker, what's the world come to?

• The World Is Not Enough (1999), directed by Michael Apted

G

• There is no more beautiful scenery or climate for summer travel than Switzerland presents. The people are industrious and honest, simple and frugal in their habits, and would be very poor with all this, if it were not from the travel through their country. I wish their suprlus population would emigrate to the United States.
  • Ulysses S. Grant, letter to Daniel Ammen (26 August 1877), as quoted in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: November 1, 1876-September 30, 1878, pp. 251–252

• Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow... like some people are only bearable under a sheet.
  • Graham Greene, as quoted in Travels With My Aunt.

• In Switzerland, 500 years of democracy and peace. And what does it produce? The cuckoo clock.
  • Graham Greene, The Third Man.

H

• Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
  • Ernest Hemingway, The Toronto Star Weekly (4 March 1922).

L

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Fate of Adelaide (1821), Title poem, opening lines.

• Romantic Switzerland! thy scenes are traced
  With characters of strange wild loveliness,
  Beauty and desolation, side by side;
  Here lofty rocks uprise, where nature seems
  To dwell alone in silent majesty;
  Rob'd by the snow, her stately palace fram'd
  Of the white hills; towering in all their pride,
  The frost's gigantic mounds are lost in clouds,
  Like to vast castles rear'd in middle air.
  The ice has sculptur'd too strange imagery—
  Obelisks, columns, spires, fantastic piles;
  Some like the polish'd marble, others clear
  As the rock crystal, others sparkling with
  The hues that melt along the sunborn bow.

P

• The Swiss are offended at being called gentlemen, and have to establish the proof of their low origin, in order to qualify them for stations of importance.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669)
  • Original French: Les Suisses s’offensent d’être dits gentilshommes, et prouvent leur roture de race pour être jugés dignes de grands emplois.
  • Alternate translation: The Swiss are offended at being called gentlemen, and prove the mean extraction of their race, in order to be deemed worthy of great places.
  • Alternate translation: The Swiss are offended at being called gentlemen, and prove themselves plebeians in order to be judged worthy of great employments.

R

• I am certain that the only permanently safe attitude for this country as regards national preparedness for self-defense is along its lines of universal service on the Swiss model. Switzerland is the most democratic of nations. Its army is the most democratic army in the world. There isn't a touch of militarism or aggressiveness about Switzerland. It has been found as a matter of actual practical experience in Switzerland that the universal military training has made a very marked increase in social efficiency and in the ability of the man thus trained to do well for himself in industry. The man who has received the training is a better citizen, is more self-respecting, more orderly, better able to hold his own, and more willing to respect the rights of others and at the same time he is a more valuable and better paid man in his business.
  • Theodore Roosevelt, "Address to the Knights of Columbus" (October 1915)

W

• In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
  • Orson Welles as the character Harry Lime in the film The Third Man (1949).