Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

If you are going through hell, keep going.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often.

The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter.

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. Speech given at Harrow School (1941-10-29).

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.

Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war. To Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, after the Munich accords (1938).

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: The believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating. I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

For myself, I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else. Speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet in London (1954-11-09).

Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.