Winston Churchill

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;we shall never surrender.

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

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.

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it cannot be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.