A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys.
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...
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.
He believed that of all languages English was was incomparably superior. On his tongue it was.
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.
Patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue.
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...
Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
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...
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.
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...
Squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all.
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,...
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future,
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...
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.
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...
Is equally true that throughout his life he retained the small boy’s glee in making mischief, in dressing up, in showing off. He was probably the only man in London who owned more hats than his wife—t...