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Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

— Winston Churchill The Second World War (book series) (1948)

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For myself I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.

Some people did not like this ceremonious style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

The Second World War (book series) (1948)

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

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Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Winston Churchill (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.