Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. For some 62 of the years between 1900 and 1964, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) and represented a total of five constituencies over that time. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.

Quotes

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

The Future
It is no use saying, "We are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

Tradition
To be conservative at 20 is heartless and to be a liberal at 60 is plain idiocy.
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
It's a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
.... You ask, What is our policy? I will say; "It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy." You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
[He] looks at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.
Who will relieve me of this Wuthering Height
If heaven is going to be full of people like Hardie, well, the Almighty can have them to himself.
There but for the grace of God goes God.
It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty.
[On recognizing China] But if you recognize anyone it does not mean you like them. For instance, we all recognize the right honourable gentleman the member for Ebbw Vale.
I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.