Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite process of good housekeeping and the personal ingenuity-here constitute the life of a free society.
Remember the story of the Spanish prisoner. For many years he was confined in a dungeon... One day it occurred to him to push the door of his cell. It was open; and it had never been locked.
We are really doing our very best. There are no doubt many mistakes and shortcomings. A lot of things are done none too well. Some things that ought to be done have not yet been done...[But Britain's effort has] justly commanded the wonder and admiration of every friendly nation in the world.
How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.
I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk - and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind the line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe... All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.