Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing impromptu remarks.
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Quoted in A Politician Must Watch His Wit by Clayton Fritchley inThe New York Times Magazine (3 July 1960), p. 31.F. E. Smith
My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw – which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them.
Nigel Rees
What then is the moral of Churchill’s life? He was the twentieth century’s great man, but we must sharply circumscribe his greatness. Because he drew the sword from the stone in 1940, what he did before and after seems admirable. Through his steadfast stance, Churchill rallied the English to die with honor—therefore they deserved to win. Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it (Luke 17:33). Yet were it not for this one courageous triumph, we might now say of him: Never had one man done so little with so much.
Winston Churchill
What then is the moral of Churchill’s life? He was the twentieth century’s great man, but we must sharply circumscribe his greatness. Because he drew the sword from the stone in 1940, what he did before and after seems admirable. Through his steadfast stance, Churchill rallied the English to die with honor—therefore they deserved to win. Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it (Luke 17:33). Yet were it not for this one courageous triumph, we might now say of him: Never had one man done so little with so much.
Mark Riebling
The fact is that I spent twenty-five years in the private sector. And that obviously teaches you something that you don't learn if you haven't spent any time in the private sector. If you were to say to me, tell me what you learned from your schooling that would help you be a President, it's like, well, how do I begin going through a list like that? You learn through life's experience. The President's experience has been exclusively in politics and as a community organizer. Both of those are fine areas of endeavor. But right now we have an economy in trouble, and someone who spent their career in the economy is more suited to help fix the economy than someone who spent his life in politics and as a community organizer.
Mitt Romney
"I spend my days preparing for life, not preparing for death... They haven't stopped me from doing what I want every day. I believe in life, I believe in freedom, so my mind is not consumed with death. It's with love, life and those things. In many ways, on many days, only my body is here, because I am thinking about what's happening around the world."
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Smith, F. E., 1st Earl of Birkenhead
Smith, Gordon
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