Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?
The worst quarrels only arise when both sides are equally in the right and in the wrong.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.
I could not live without Champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.
Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism.
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” he replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbour. We are all in the same boat now.
Time after time, history ran over the luddites and romanticists, those who sought to restore the old and delay the new. And every time, history did it with faster, more reliable and more advanced vehicles.
We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.
To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
In one respect a cavalry charge is very like ordinary life. So long as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth. But as soon as you have lost a stirrup, have a rein cut, have dropped your weapon, are wounded, or your horse is wounded, then is the moment when from all quarters enemies rush upon you. Such.
When you’re 20 you care what everyone thinks. When you’re 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks. When you’re 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.
Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence. It presents all the characteristics of a pestilence. It breaks out with great suddenness; it is violently contagious; it throws people into a frenzy of excitement; it spreads with extraordinary rapidity; the mortality is terrible; so that, after a while, like other pestilences, the disease tends to wear itself out.
A man may be poor; he may have nothing at all except his labour to sell; he may be a manual worker for a weekly wage, but in a free commonwealth he must enjoy as good a right as any lord, or prelate, or capitalist in the country to the integrity of his own political convictions.
All comes out even at the end of the day, and all will come out yet more even when all the days are ended.
There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one.
A society is measured by the treatment of its prisoners.
Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.
Never ever give up.