"There is no such thing as a career path - it is crazy paving and you have to lay it yourself."

Dominic Cadbury

"Any change, at any time, for any reason is to be deplored."

Duke of Cambridge

"Grief is the price we pay for love"

Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey

"I have ordered the armed forces to take all necessary measures to deal with this situation and to ensure the continuance of democratic order." 23.02.1981 after Civil Guards burst into parliament.

King Juan Carlos

"Our grand business in life is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

Thomas Carlyle (Belfast minister)

"Her bodyguard ,marched down the red carpet. Big men in scarlet, Beefeater sort of tunics. Medals. Pikes. Nicotine-stained moustaches. At the south end of the hall, a frieze of musicians marched very slowly across the ledge under the high, stained-glass windows. They were dressed in cloth of yellow gold. They were the State Trumpeters. The Band of the Grenadier Guards was playing the song we sang as children.

"Fierce the beacon light is flaming, with its tongues of fire proclaiming, chieftains sundered to your shaming, Harlech for the right.

"Yes, that's what a lot of it's about. Chiefs lying dead and wounded yet where first was grounded. Freedom's flag still holding the crag.

"I'd had dinner the night before with some soldiers. Very likeable young men; cheerful, funny. Heaven knows how many men they've killed between them. One described the look on Geoff Hoon's face when he'd retailed the previous night's strangling and stabbing. The Secretary of State went quite white and wanted to sit down.

"'There's no way we'd fight for some transitory government,' the major said. 'Our oath is to the Queen. We fight for the Queen.'

"The huge bell, Big Ben, struck the hour. She didn't arrive. She can't have been late. The clock was fast. Two thousand of us sat under the hammer beams with the flying angels, looking at two red thrones on the distant steps. How unlike a political occasion it was. Party conferences are filled with driving, purposeful music, clever lighting, warm-up acts, applause leaders. We sat looking at the blank backs of the empty thrones.

"There she suddenly was, our Head of State, Head of our Armed Forces. A youth carrying a long white wand led her up the red carpet, into her world of ancient office and mysterious courtliness.

"Whatever she is, she isn't, in that soldier's phrase, transitory."

Sketch in the Independent, 01.05.2002, to mark the HM The Queen's Golden Jubilee address to parliament.

Simon Carr

".. And the loony-bins of South East Asia are jam-packed with honest field men who tried to unravel the life-style of hot money once it entered the maw of the overseas Chinese." [ The Honourable Schoolboy]

"For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools, as some kind of deception; or whether there was a real efficient secret service somewhere else. Later, in my fiction, I invented one. But alas the reality was the mediocrity. Ex-colonial policemen mingling with failed academics, failed lawyers, failed missionaries and failed debutantes gave our canteen the amorphous quality of an Old School outing on the Orient Express. Everyone seemed to smell of failure." [of MI5 the Security Service] (UK Eyes Alpha)

John le Carré
a.k.a. David Cornwell

"I mean, how can you hold a peace conference when everyone is killing each other.?" (9/91)

Lord Carrington

"The British flag has never flown over a more powerful or more united Empire ... Never did our voice count for more in the council of nations; or in determining the future destinies of mankind." 18.11.1918

"From the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from Protestant majority. Let us take care to win all that is best among those who have been opposed to us in the past. While maintaining intact our own religion let us give the same rights to the religion of our neighbours."

Edward Carson

It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation, it was my decision to cancel it when a problem developed in the placement of our rescue team. The responsibility is purely my own. 25.04.1980 following the aborted attempt to rescue US hostages in Tehran.

Jimmy Carter

"Arms are my ornaments, warfare my repose."

"Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in Hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman."

Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes

"My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is 'peace for our time.' Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." 30 Sep 1938.

"How terrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing." (27 September 1938 referring to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia)

Neville Chamberlain

"In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different."

Coco Chanel

"Virtues can be afforded only by the poor, who have nothing to lose."

Perspectives, 1966 Alexander Chase

"If the masses do the right thing, then this is certainly for the wrong reasons."

"Es gibt Situationen, in denen man ein Geheimnis halb preisgeben muß, um den Rest zu bewahren."

Lord Chesterfield

"The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire." 12.12.1930

Churchill was one of the few people to get the better of George Bernard Shaw. The latter invited him to the first night of one of his plays, enclosing two tickets. "One for yourself and one for your friend - if you have one." Churchill wrote back saying he couldn't make it, but asked if he could have tickets for the second night - "if there is one."

A critic once censured Churchill for ending a sentence with a preposition. Churchill scribbled the man a note :"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."

On being told of an MP by the name of Bossom he said "I see. Neither one thing nor the other." On hearing that the Greek premier was called Plasteras, he remarked "Well, I hope he doesn't have feet of clay too."

A female MP once rebuked him for being drunk at a dinner party. He retorted "And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow." "Winston, if I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee." "If you were my wife, I would drink it."

In a later year it was tactfully pointed out to Churchill that his fly was open. The elder statesman simply scowled and said "Dead birds don't fall out of nests" When a very old man on one of his increasingly rare visits to the House, an MP remarked of him, "After all, they say he's potty." "They say he can't hear either," muttered Churchill.

Entering the Commons washroom one day, Churchill deliberately took up position at the opposite end of the urinal to Clement Attlee, who asked "Feeling stand-offish today are we, Winston?" "That's right" countered Churchill. "Every time you see something big, you want to nationalise it"

The young man who photographed him on his 80th birthday said courteously that he hoped he could do the same on his hundredth. "I don't see why not," said Churchill. "You look reasonably fit to me."

"Ich glaube nur Statistiken, die ich selbst gefälscht habe."

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last."

"A sheep in sheep's clothing." of Ramsay MacDonald

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."

"What would happen, I wonder, of the armies suddenly and simultaneously went on strike and said some other method must be found of settling the dispute !" Nov. 1914.

"You ask what is our aim? I can answer you in one word: Victory! Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be: for without victory there is no survival. ... Come then, let us go forward together, with our united strength." 13.05.1940 Maiden speech as PM

"What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our nation is turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'." (18.06.1940, outset of the Battle of Britain)

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

"In war: resolution; in defeat: defiance; in victory: magnanimity; in peace: goodwill."

"It is no use saying "we are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary."

"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; without victory, there is no survival."

"All men shall be enabled to live in freedom from fear and want." Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, 14.08.1941

"This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." 10.11.1942 on victory at Alamein

Our common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. Churchil at Harvard, 09.09.1943

"We should shake hands with the Russians as far to the East as possible." Feb 1945.

"I remember that a fortnight or so before the last war, the Kaiser's friend Herr Ballin, the great shipping magnate, told me that he had heard Bismarck say towards the end of his life, If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.' The murder of the Archduke of Sarajevo in 1914 set the signal for the First World Warc. I cannot conceive that the elements for a new conflict do not exist in the Balkans today. I am not using the language of Bismarck, but nevertheless not many Members of the new House of Commons will be content with the new situation that prevails in those mountainous, turbulent, ill-organized and warlike regions." - Sir Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 16 Aug 1945

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent."

"Let Europe arise again in glory, and by her strength and unity ensure the peace of the world." (1946)

"I am easily satisfied with the very best."

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."

"Enterprises must be prepared with specially trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror on the 'butcher and bolt' policy."

"Once out of power, de Gaulle can go where he likes and he will certainly go where he can do the most mischief." Feb 1943 letter to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.

"Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt." to de Gaulle before Normandy Landings on 06.06.1944.

"It is remarkable, as he has not a single soldier in the great battle now deevloping. He has arrived without the Commissioners whom we understood he was going to bring. This is to make clear his position that he will not discuss the civil administration of France with us."

"I, like the president, find the greatest difficulty in working with de Gaulle, and that his personality and conduct constitute the bigest obstacle to the relations between Britain and the US on one hand and the France whom we all wish to help on the other... no breach will occur between the President and me on account of anything that de Gaulle may do." 11.06.1944

"Personally I agree with the president in his distrust of de Gaulle .. remember that there is not a scrap of generosity about this man, who only wishes to pose as the saviour of France in this operation without a single French soldier at his back." 13.06.1944

"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others."

" If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

"In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable; in NATO, thank God, invisible." Of Montgomery.

"A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject."

"From Stettin, in the Baltic, to Trieste, in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."

"The United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lit under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate."

"It is always dangerous for soldiers, sailors or airmen to play at politics. They enter a sphere in which the values are quite different from those to which they have hitherto been accustomed."

"I stand by my original programme — blood, toil, tears, and sweat to which I added five months later ‘many shortcomings, mistakes, and disappointments’."

"In war-time.. .truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

"The American Constitution declares ‘All men are born equal.’ The British Socialist Party add: ‘All men must be kept equal’."

"When I warned them [the French Generals of Vichy France] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their Generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet: ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ Some chicken! Some neck!"

"I am confident that we shall succeed in defeating and largely destroying this most tremendous onslaught by which we are now threatened, and anyhow, whatever happens, we will all go down fighting to the end."

" We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end."

" We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."

"Never give in! 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."

"No matter how enmeshed a commander becomes in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account."

"It is no use saying "we are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary."

"When you feel you cannot continue in your position for another minute, and all that is in human power has been done, that is the moment when the enemy is most exhausted, and when one step forward will give you the fruits of the struggle you have borne."

"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; without victory, there is no survival."

"Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations - all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war." (in My early life)

"This was a secret war, whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public; and only with difficulty is it comprehended, even now, by those outside the small high scientific circles concerned. No such warfare had ever been waged by mortal men." On the scientific war effort

"This is no war of chieftans or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of people and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, bur whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors." 14 Jul 1940 BBC

Winston Churchill

"Takt ist der auf das Benehmen angewandte gute Geschmack."

"Es gibt wenig Wohltäter, die nicht wie Satan sagen: ‘Knie wieder und bete mich an.’"

French moralist 1741-94 Nicolas-Sébastien de Chamfort