Winston Churchill

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

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

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valor, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

When I warned them the French that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck!

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare. While he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

Every great movement must experience three stages ridicule, discussion, adoption.

It is necessary to hope… for hope itself is happiness.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.