Winston Churchill

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.

The United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lit under it, there's no limit to the power it can generate.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

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

Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Indeed I do not think we should be justified in using any but the more sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire, and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

These two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some affairs for mutual and general advantage. I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands, and better days.

Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.

If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for thirty minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.

The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.

The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.

Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.

Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.

There are men in the world who derive an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as other from success.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

For the first time I heard shots fired in anger, heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air.

I could not help reflecting that the bullet which had struck the chestnut [horse] had certainly passed within a foot of my head. So at any rate I had been 'under fire.' That was something.