Leo Tolstoy

Here I am alive, and it’s not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.

Everything depends on upbringing.

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.

I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling human cruelty… break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more.

On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory.

After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.

It’s been a big week for our side. Over on the beaches of Normandy our boys have fired the opening guns of the long awaited drive to liberate the world.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling ones pulse and taking ones temperature. I see that a speaker at the week-end said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another Direction

People didn’t want war. We were forced in it. How fast we finish it depends on how free a hand our generals and admirals have. The less interference they get from the politicians the quicker they’ll end it.

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Thus, then, on the night of the tenth of May, at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.

The enemy is in front of us, the enemy is behind us, the enemy is to the right and to the left of us. They can’t get away this time!

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.