Winston Churchill

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.

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!

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.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

As the Spanish proverb says, He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

When you know better, you do better.

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

Appearances matter – and remember to smile.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

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

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.