Winston Churchill

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

If we win, nobody will care. If we lose, there will be nobody to care.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.

Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.

My emancipation don’t fit your equation.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.