It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Winston ChurchillRead
It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.
Interpretation
Churchill expresses sorrow over the decline of the British Empire and its past contributions to the world.
In this quote, Winston Churchill reflects on the profound sadness he feels as he witnesses the disintegration of the British Empire. He acknowledges the empire's historical significance, including its glories and the services it provided to humanity, while lamenting the inevitable decline that accompanies such a monumental shift in power and influence.
In practice
In a discussion about historical empires during a lecture.
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.
History suggests that the disillusioned and the disaffected do not readily take to the streets nor man the barricades to defend a system that failed to defend them.
The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.
Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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