A man is all the people he has been. Some recollections never die. They lie in one's subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.
His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but do not follow him.
Henry V was naturally my idol, and here we skirt one of the central events of my life: my discovery of Shakespeare. I was now fifteen. For years I had been plagued by a vocabulary of words I could und...
Patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue.
Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the
Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
Let me first assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Byron wrote his shortest and most eloquent poem as a testament to a titled woman who had taken leave of her husband for a nine-month romp with him: Caroline Lamb, Goddamn.
A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a Zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.
Violence had brought the United States independence, freed the slaves, and first conquered the West and then tamed it. Now it had raised working men up from the industrial cellar. Labor might forget t...
He loved books and wrote of them: if you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle or, as it were, fondle them: peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence th...
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future,
I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy.
He believed that of all languages English was was incomparably superior. On his tongue it was.
At Waterloo Pierre Cambronne commanded Napoleon's Imperial Guard. When all was lost, a British officer asked him to lay down his arms. Generations of schoolboys have been taught that he replied: The G...
There are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory.
Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.
A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hôtel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in Eng...
Sherwood, Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter and biographer, wrote that although Churchill’s consumption of alcohol… continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours, it did so wit...
Of an MP who strung together phrases of jargon, Churchill said, He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they're going to say; when they are speaking,...