Winston Churchill

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

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

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.’

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Life is a progress, and not a station.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.