Winston Churchill

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Every stroke our fury strikes is sure to hit ourselves at last.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it… Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.

Blows are sarcasm’s turned stupid.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Be confident, not certain

There is only one thing about which I shall have no regrets when my life ends. I have savored to the full all the small, daily joys. The bright sunshine on the breakfast table; the smell of the air at dusk; the sound of the clock ticking; the light rains that start gently after midnight; the hour when the family come home; Sunday-evening tea before the fire! I have never missed one moment of beauty, not even taken it for granted. Spring, summer, autumn, or winter. I wish I had failed as little in other ways.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.