[Political skill] is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month,

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.

A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow.

We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance [Dunkirk] the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.

The maxim of the British people is “Business as usual.”

The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.

It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality.

There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the white ant.

When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men’s souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe- striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals.