Winston Churchill

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Private men, in fine, are so much their own, that, paying common dues, they are sovereigns of all the rest. Yet the public must and will be served; and they that do it well, deserve public marks of honour and respect. To do so, men must have public minds, as well as salaries; or they will serve private ends at the public cost. Government can never be well administered, but where those intrusted make conscience of well discharging their places.

A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Upon awakening, let the words Thank You flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.