1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5135
5136
5137
5138
5139
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cffc1ae | Churchill, aware of Hitler's use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what Hitler's fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that "this is just between us." | William R. Manchester | ||
| d42b022 | The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 8e43281 | One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in soci.. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 12e2c6f | The weather was worsening, but winter was not the enemy of the Russian soldier; thirteen million pairs of fleece-lined boots stamped Made in the USA ensured that the Red Army marched in relative comfort. | William R. Manchester | ||
| f26a128 | It meant good-bye to London and to Churchill, whose company Harriman thoroughly enjoyed, and to Pamela, whose bed he enjoyed (the lovers' hiatus lasted almost three decades, until 1971, when Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward became the third Mrs. Harriman). | William R. Manchester | ||
| fa6d5e7 | 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.. | William Manchester | ||
| ee88b3f | Dear John-- It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief--You can always be proud of him-- Affectionately Lyndon B. Johnson The second was a little longer. Himself the father of two girls, he had been particularly fond of the President's daughter. THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON Friday Night 7:.. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 71a923c | The truth is so precious," Churchill told Stalin, "that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies." | William R. Manchester | ||
| b95319e | Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England's imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 999b070 | 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.. | William Manchester | ||
| a90f045 | They were following their prime minister, matching their government's mood. | leadership optimism | William Manchester | |
| b6fe7fb | I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. | William Manchester | ||
| bd714bd | Nazi aggression, one might think, should have lent support to Winston's candidacy. At this, of all times, it seems inconceivable that Baldwin would pick a weak man to supervise the defense of England. Nevertheless, that was what he did. Baldwin said outright: "If I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross." In his biography of Chamberlain, Keith Feiling writes that the Rhineland was "decisive against Winston's appointment"; it was "obvious that H.. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 4e6f780 | 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." | William Manchester | ||
| 30ce4c2 | If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future, | William Manchester | ||
| 7bb402c | there are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory. | William Manchester | ||
| cd7c23c | 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. | William Manchester | ||
| 2d491e9 | 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. | William Manchester | ||
| 8677230 | Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees all others. | William Manchester | ||
| 95215c6 | Churchill warned them now: "When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But"--his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear--"your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby." | William R. Manchester | ||
| 0ebc167 | when I call him a son of a bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth. | William Manchester | ||
| 6f35228 | The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 61f2e86 | People who go to Italy to look at ruins won't have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 2684821 | 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. | William Manchester | ||
| 37958ee | 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. | leadership perspective | William Manchester | |
| 4feca40 | Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary; it fulfils the same function as pain in the human body, it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 52f546c | In Churchill's moral paradigm, loyalty was an absolute, where trust admitted to degrees. | William R. Manchester | ||
| 1d63a66 | 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. | William Manchester | ||
| 409822d | 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 .. | William Manchester | ||
| d161e5f | Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: "The Unnecessary War." | William R. Manchester | ||
| eb9ea2d | 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." | William Manchester | ||
| 1a39a99 | 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.. | William Manchester | ||
| d19d88d | patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue. | William Manchester | ||
| 0757d8a | 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" | William Manchester | ||
| 18d8b12 | Exploring the mind of the psychotic is impossible - the shortest distance between two points becomes a maze. | William Manchester | ||
| 0f1b349 | 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.. | William Manchester | ||
| 4caf80d | In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. "It makes no difference," Winston replied wryly. "The dead bird doesn't leave the nest." | William R. Manchester | ||
| 0feed13 | 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." | William Manchester | ||
| 9262518 | All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship of the early sixteenth century. | William Manchester | ||
| fdd2a1d | 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." | William Manchester | ||
| a76a4bd | read three or four books at a time to avoid tedium"--and" | William R. Manchester | ||
| 89c389b | 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.. | William Manchester | ||
| 010c31a | Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head. | William James | ||
| 255f054 | 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. | William Manchester |