"Why not? Certainly it is okay for them to play. I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man. In my book that goes not only for baseball but in all walks of life."
Ty Cobb / Responding to the impending integration of the , as quoted in "Between the Lines" by Dean Gordon Hancock (ANP), in The Atlanta Daily World (February 10, 1952); reproduced in "The Knife in Ty Cobb’s Back" (30 August 2011), Smithsonian, by Gi
"I think if I had my life to live over again, I'd do things a little different. I was aggressive, perhaps too aggressive. Maybe I went too far. I always had to be right in any argument I was in, I always had to be first in everything. I do indeed think I would have done some things different. And if I had I believe I would have had more friends."
Ty Cobb / Statement made in 1961, as quoted in Voices from Cooperstown: Baseball's Hall of Famers Tell It Like It Was (1998) by Anthony J. Connor, p. 286
"I feel that anything I could say in the way of eulogizing Hans would not be one-hundredth as much as he deserves, so I will just say my heart is with him tonight in wishing him three or four more score of pleasant years and that he will lead them all just as long as he wishes. I will be drinking a toast to the greatest ball player ever on his forty-first birthday, the night of February 24, away down here in Georgia."
Ty Cobb / On , from a letter written in February 1915, expressing regret at being unable to attend a banquet honoring Wagner; as quoted in "Wagner Greatest of All Diamond Stars, Says Cobb," The Pittsburgh Gazette Times (February 23, 1915), p. 10
"Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good."
Vince Lombardi / First team meeting as Packers coach (1959), reported in Chuck Carlson, Game of My Life: 25 Stories of Packers Football (2004), p. 149; Richard Scott, Jay Barker, Legends of Alabama Football (2004), p. 78.
"Leadership rests not only upon ability but upon commitment and upon loyalty and upon pride and upon followers...Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many qualities; and while no one individual possesses all the needed talents to go into leadership, each man can develop a combination to make him a leader."
Vince Lombardi / reported in Donald T. Phillips, Run To Win: Vince Lombardi on Coaching and Leadership (2001), pg. 180.
"Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict."
Winston Churchill / Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 "Amritsar" ; at the time, Churchill was serving as Secretary of State for War under Prime Minister David Lloyd George
"I look forward to the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit. I do not think that Liberalism in any circumstances can cut itself off from this fertile field of social effort, and I would recommend you not to be scared in discussing any of these proposals, just because some old woman comes along and tells you they are Socialistic."
Winston Churchill / The People's Rights [1909] (1970), p. 154
"Let them [Socialists] abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality... they will increase the well-being of the world."
Winston Churchill / Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, Vol. IV, p. 3821, (21 January 1926)
"I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!"
Winston Churchill / Chapter 3 (Examinations), p. 27.
"The enthronement in office of a Socialist Government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great States only on the morrow of defeat in war. It will delay the return of prosperity; it will check enterprise and impair credit; it will open a period of increasing political confusion and disturbance."
Winston Churchill / Letter to a correspondent shortly before the Labour Party formed its first government (17 January 1924), quoted in The Times (18 January 1924), p. 14
"I submit respectfully to the House as a general principle that our responsibility in this matter is directly proportionate to our power. Where there is great power there is great responsibility, where there is less power there is less responsibility, and where there is no power there can, I think, be no responsibility."
Winston Churchill / In the House of Commons, February 28, 1906 speech South African native races
"I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race."
Winston Churchill / As Home Secretary in a 1910 Departmental Paper. The original document is in the collection of Asquith's papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Also quoted in Clive Ponting, "Churchill" (Sinclair Stevenson 1994)
"Hitherto, Hitler's triumphant career has been borne onwards, not only by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them."
Winston Churchill / "Hitler and His Choice", The Strand Magazine (November 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 680
"If Great Britain lost her Empire and India and her share in world trade and her sea power, she would be like a vast whale stranded in one your Scottish bays, which swam in upon the tide and then was left to choke and rot upon the sands. We should be like a great shop emporium in a district from which prosperity has for ever departed. We least of all peoples and races can afford to fail. Failure to us does not mean merely that we shall not improve. It means that we shall be ruined and frozen out."
Winston Churchill / Rectorial address ("The present decline of Parliamentary government in Great Britain") to Edinburgh University (5 March 1931), quoted in The Times (6 March 1931), p. 19
"I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it."
"The old Conservative Party, with its religious convictions and constitutional principles, will disappear, and a new Party will arise like perhaps the Republican Party of the United States of America—rich, materialist, and secular—whose opinions will turn on tariffs, and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries."
Winston Churchill / Speech in the House of Commons (28 May 1903)
"Liberalism supplies at once the higher impulse and the practicable path; it appeals to persons by sentiments of generosity and humanity; it proceeds by courses of moderation. By gradual steps, by steady effort from day to day, from year to year, Liberalism enlists hundreds of thousands upon the side of progress and popular democratic reform whom militant Socialism would drive into violent Tory reaction... The cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions."
Winston Churchill / The People's Rights [1909] (1970), pp. 152-153
"The quarrel between a tremendous democratic electorate and a one-sided hereditary chamber of wealthy men has often been threatened, has often been averted, has been long debated, has been long delayed, but it has always been inevitable, and it has come at last. It is now open, it is now flagrant, and it must now be carried to a conclusion."
Winston Churchill / The People's Rights [1909] (1970), p. 20
"Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death."
Winston Churchill / Have You a Hobby?, Answers, 21 April 1934
"Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you — another "British Gazette."
Winston Churchill / Speech in the House of Commons, July 7, 1926 "Emergency Services" ; at this time, Churchill was serving as Chancellor of the Excheqer under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
"The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives, and though each had ardent advocates, most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre — horrid and inexorcisable."
Winston Churchill / The World Crisis, Volume V : the Aftermath (1929), Churchill, Butterworth (London).
"I have never taken the view which seems to give so much pleasure to morbid and misanthropic minds, a view which they have spread so widely through the United States, that Britain is "down and out," that the foundations of her commercial and industrial greatness have been sapped, that the stamina of her people is impaired, that her workmen are mutinous and lazy, that her employers are pleasure-loving and benighted, that her institutions are crumbling, and that her Empire is falling to pieces."
Winston Churchill / Speech in Ulster Hall, Belfast (2 March 1926), quoted in The Times (3 March 1926), p. 21
"There must be room in our army system for nearly everyone who is not grossly idle or grossly stupid. It is not a case of employing incompetent or worthless men, and such should, of course, be expelled from the army. It is a case of finding suitable employment for officers not fit for higher command."
Winston Churchill / Officers and Gentlemen, The Saturday Evening Post, 29 December 1900.
"Although trade is important, there are other and stronger bonds of Empire, and since the Conference of 1926 nothing but common interests and traditions have held the Empire together. But those are mighty ties, incomprehensible to Europeans, which have drawn millions of men from the far corners of the earth to the battlefields of France, and we must trust to them to continue to draw us together."
Winston Churchill / Speech in Toronto (16 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (1981; 2012), p. 51
"The true characteristic of all British strategy lies in the use of amphibious power. Not the sea alone, but the land and the sea together: not the Fleet alone, but the Army in the hand of the Fleet."
Winston Churchill / The Great Amphibian, The Sunday Pictorial, 23 July 1916.
"There is nothing economically unsound in increasing temporarily and artificially the demand for labour during a period of temporary and artificial contraction. There is a plain need of some averaging machinery to regulate and even-up the general course of the labour market. ... by every step in that direction you would free thousands of your fellow-countrymen from undeserved agony and ruin."
Winston Churchill / The People's Rights [1909] (1970), pp. 133-134
"To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often."
Winston Churchill / Winston Churchill (June 23, 1925), His complete speeches, 1897–1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James, Chelsea House ed., vol. 4 (1922–1928), p. 3706. During a debate with Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden.
"If England had not resisted German militarism, in my view the German hegemony of Europe would have been established and our island would have had to face a united Continental army. It is the same old story from the days of Marlborough and Napoleon."
Winston Churchill / Letter to G. M. Trevelyan (3 January 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 623
"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
Winston Churchill / "Hitler and His Choice", The Strand Magazine (November 1935)
"Why should anybody make a great fortune out of the war? While everybody has been serving the country, profiteers and contractors & shipping speculators have gained fortunes of a gigantic character. Why shd we be bound to bear the unpopularity of defending old Runciman's ill-gotten gains? I wd reclaim everything above £10,000 (to let the small fry off) in reduction of the War Debt."
Winston Churchill / Letter to David Lloyd George (21 November 1918), quoted in Paul Addison, Churchill On The Home Front, 1900–1955 (1992), p. 197
"Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production."
Winston Churchill / Quoted in Randolph Churchill's diary entry (24 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (1981; 2012), p. 55
"For my own part I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities which he excites among his opponents. I have always set myself not merely to relish but to deserve thoroughly their censure."
Winston Churchill / November 17, 1906, Institute of Journalists Dinner, London; in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 392
"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year has passed."
Winston Churchill / (Home Secretary) Churchill to Prime Minister Asquith on compulsory sterilization of 'the feeble-minded and insane'; cited, as follows (excerpted from longer note) : It is worth noting that eugenics was not a fringe movement of obscure scien
"You are also mistaken in supposing that I have an anti-German obsession. British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt who it is now...It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power."
Winston Churchill / Letter to Lord Londonderry (6 May 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 733
"Women who discharge their duty to the state viz marrying and giving birth to children are adequately represented by their husbands."
Winston Churchill / A note on the women’s suffrage bill pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register (he was subsequently to change his mind), quoted in Churchill, "Women’s Suffrage, and 'Black Friday,' November 1910", 1897
"Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe."
Winston Churchill / The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part II : Chapter XXIII (Victory), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), p. 544
"I am strongly of opinion that we require to strengthen our armaments by air and upon the seas in order to make sure that we are still judges of our own fortunes, our own destinies and our own action... Not to have an adequate air force in the present state of the world is to compromise the foundations of national freedom and independence."
Winston Churchill / Speech in the House of Commons (14 March 1933)