Statesman Quotes

“We are all worms. However, I like to think I'm a glow worm”

“Wars are not won by evacuations.”

“Now that we are, as you say, 'in the same boat,' would it not be wise for us to have another conference ... and the sooner the better.”

“We have no lasting friends, no lasting enemies, only lasting interests.”

“If one has to submit, it is wasteful not to do so with the best grace possible.”

“Whenever I feel the need to take some exercise I lie down until the feeling goes away.”

“I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, 'Verify your quotations.”

“It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.”

“Indeed I do not think we should be justified in using any but the more sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire, and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley.”

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.”

“If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.”

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

“The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.”

“Hasty work and premature decisions may lead to penalties out of all proportion to the issues immediately involved.”

“We do not war with races primarily as such. Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must for ever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment, under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man.”

“What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?”

“Everybody has always underrated the Russians. They keep their own secrets alike from foe and friends.”

“If you recognize anyone it does not mean you like them.”

“The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”

“Make sure that the beer - four pints a week - goes to the troops under fire before any of the parties in the rear get a drop.”

“I'm so bored with it all.”

“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind the line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe... All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

“We need to be strong in order to avoid war; and to win. A politician looks forward only to the next election. A statesman looks forward to the next generation. Any person who is over 30 and is not a conservative, has no brains.”