In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.

People do not make wars; governments do.

A useless life is an early death.

What one has, one ought to use: and whatever he does he should do with all his might.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

It kills me to lose. If I’m a troublemaker, and I don’t think that my temper makes me one, then it’s because I can’t stand losing. That’s the way I am about winning, all I ever wanted to do was finish first.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

I have promised myself that I’m going to do everything I can for as long as I can.

Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience.

When I say something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn’t investigated. They might find that I don’t really exist – that I’m just a hologram.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

I think the F2 tyres are probably one of the hardest things to adapt to, harder than the Formula One Pirellis were to get used to.

Life is wasted on the living.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

War is a contagion.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,‘ he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. ‚Shake it off. Stop complainin‘. Stop grumblin‘. Stop cryin‘. We are going to press on. We have work to do.

You can’t stop everything from happening. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’re certainly trying. If a car doesn’t have four hundred air bags in it, then it’s no good.

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.