Winston Churchill

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

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

I will not pretend that if I had to choose between communism and Nazism I would choose communism.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it. Theres another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modernit dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: The tail of China is large and will not be wagged. I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honour to be addressing you at this moment.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

If you want the moon, do not hide from the night. If you want a rose, do not hide from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Those who would mend the world must first mend themselves.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.