Emotions and Feelings

When I warned them [the French Government] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ Some chicken! Some neck!

Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

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.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

What is our aim? … 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.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

I do not know whether it was Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that it was Chou.

Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

From all that terror teaches,

Fools! For I also had my hour;

Fools! For I also had my hour;

For the great Gaels of Ireland

I tell you naught for your comfort,

What I say is, patience, and shuffle the cards.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics.