It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Winston ChurchillRead
Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.
Interpretation
Being clever and adaptable is essential for overcoming challenges.
This quote by Winston Churchill highlights the difference between mere compliance or betrayal ('ratting') and the cleverness and resourcefulness required to navigate difficult situations and reverse decisions or allegiances ('re-ratting'). It suggests that while anyone can reveal secrets or betray trust, it takes true intelligence and creativity to turn a situation around and find new paths forward.
In practice
During a business presentation about innovation, you might say this quote to emphasize creativity in problem-solving.
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.
He hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks.
Do not be jealous of others' good qualities, but out of admiration adopt them yourself.
Like Musa you too will be saved from the Sea. Just look through it and see Him. Then the illusion will crumble and you'll be left with the only Reality: Him.
The first mistake in public business is the going into it.
Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.