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b8b06c0
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The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.
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writing
perspective
storytelling
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William Manchester |
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c9cf159
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Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
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William Manchester |
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100a327
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His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but do not follow him.
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William Manchester |
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c788696
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Let me first assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
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William Manchester |
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6fc820a
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I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy.
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William Manchester |
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f4563fe
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Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
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William Manchester |
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c622760
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A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a Zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife's bed is a cause of the gravest concern.
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William Manchester |
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e0b7ad2
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John Kennedy once remarked that "victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan."
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William Manchester |
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93ef60f
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There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble.
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war
fear
marines
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William Manchester |
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9a9fc6b
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A man is all the people he has been. Some recollections never die. They lie in one's subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.
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William Manchester |
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425cb8b
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Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams--but it never builds.
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William Manchester |
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18cc198
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A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys.
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William Manchester |
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96a8748
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Inside his second-rate mind, one felt, a third-rate mind was struggling toward the surface.
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William Manchester |
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8e581c4
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GBS wired Winston: "Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend--if you have one." Churchill wired back: "Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second--if there is one."61"
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William Manchester |
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fa6d5e7
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He loved books and wrote of them: "if you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle or, as it were, fondle them: peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what it is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends. Let them, at any rate, be you..
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William Manchester |
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999b070
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is equally true that throughout his life he retained the small boy's glee in making mischief, in dressing up, in showing off. He was probably the only man in London who owned more hats than his wife--top hats, Stetsons, seamen's caps, his hussar helmet, a privy councillor's cocked hat, homburgs, an astrakhan, an Irish "paddy hat," a white pith helmet, an Australian bush hat, a fez, the huge beplumed hat he wore as a Knight of the Garter, ev..
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William Manchester |
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a90f045
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They were following their prime minister, matching their government's mood.
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leadership
optimism
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William Manchester |
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b6fe7fb
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I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
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William Manchester |
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4e6f780
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The heart of the other quotation, from Lincoln, was: "If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, these shops might as well be closed to any other business. I do the very best I know how, and I mean to keep doing so to the end."
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William Manchester |
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30ce4c2
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If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future,
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William Manchester |
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7bb402c
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there are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory.
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William Manchester |
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cd7c23c
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was an eighth cousin of Churchill, and a sixth cousin, once removed, of FDR--and three of World War II's great leaders were thus linked by American intermarriages.
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William Manchester |
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2d491e9
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squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all.
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William Manchester |
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8677230
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Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees all others.
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William Manchester |
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0ebc167
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when I call him a son of a bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth.
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William Manchester |
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2684821
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A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it... the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts.... It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.
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William Manchester |
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37958ee
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The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.
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leadership
perspective
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William Manchester |
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1d63a66
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Violence had brought the United States independence, freed the slaves, and first conquered the West and then tamed it. Now it had raised working men up from the industrial cellar. Labor might forget that and turn conservative, but for liberals to deny other oppressed groups the right to revolt would prove impossible. Thus were the seeds of later anguish planted in innocence, even in idealism.
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William Manchester |
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409822d
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At Waterloo Pierre Cambronne commanded Napoleon's Imperial Guard. When all was lost, a British officer asked him to lay down his arms. Generations of schoolboys have been taught that he replied: "The Guard dies, but never surrenders." Actually he said: "Merde!" ("Shit!") The French know this; a euphemism for merde is called "the word of Cambronne." Yet children are still told that he said what they know he did not say. So it was with me. I ..
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William Manchester |
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eb9ea2d
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Later he would say that writing a book "is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
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William Manchester |
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1a39a99
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Henry V was naturally my idol, and here we skirt one of the central events of my life: my discovery of Shakespeare. I was now fifteen. For years I had been plagued by a vocabulary of words I could understand but not pronounce because I had never heard them spoken. "Anchor" had come out "an-chore," "colonel" as "ko-low-nall," and I had put the accent on the third syllable of "diaspora." But I could no longer ignore diacritical marks in dicti..
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William Manchester |
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d19d88d
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patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue.
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William Manchester |
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0757d8a
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Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Then, after calling"
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William Manchester |
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18d8b12
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Exploring the mind of the psychotic is impossible - the shortest distance between two points becomes a maze.
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William Manchester |
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0f1b349
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A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hotel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in England. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dispatched an RAF Comet to bring the Great Man home. The press expected the worst. Montague Browne believed he would have to instruct the Duke of Norfolk to set Operation Hope Not--Churchill's state funeral..
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William Manchester |
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0feed13
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If Peking wasn't stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as "the military colossus of the East." U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world's new nations would gravitate toward neutralism."
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William Manchester |
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9262518
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All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship of the early sixteenth century.
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William Manchester |
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fdd2a1d
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And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously re-worded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The Prime Minister scrawled across the page, "This is nonsense up with which I will not put."
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William Manchester |
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89c389b
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It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their oppressed neighbors across the Irish sea. The other -- small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources -- supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and affl..
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William Manchester |
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255f054
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have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim.
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William Manchester |
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f93e4a4
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Sherwood, Franklin Roosevelt's speechwriter and biographer, wrote that although Churchill's "consumption of alcohol... continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours," it did so "without visible effect on his health or mental processes. Anyone who suggested he became befuddled with drink obviously never had to become involved in an argument with him on some factual problem late at night...." Churchill's drinking habit..
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William Manchester |
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50cb9bd
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The Jap," as MacArthur called the enemy--nearly everyone else called Japanese "Nips," short for "Dai Nippon," the" --
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William Manchester |
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e59c227
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If I knew what was true, I'd be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle blasts. But so far, I have not found it,
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William Manchester |
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93155ed
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Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the
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William Manchester |