Winston Churchill

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

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

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

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

You. Not wanting me. Was the beginning of me wanting myself. Thank you.

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

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

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.