It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Winston ChurchillRead
Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.
Interpretation
The speaker is expressing a growing disinterest in the military and a preference for the church, indicating a search for meaning or purpose.
In this quote, Winston Churchill reflects on his changing sentiments towards his career in the Army, suggesting that as time passes, he feels increasingly detached from military life. He implies that the Church, symbolizing spirituality and a search for meaning, resonates more with him, showcasing a profound personal transformation and a reevaluation of his values and aspirations.
In practice
During a remembrance speech reflecting on service members, one could use this quote to highlight personal paths beyond the military.
It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
The United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lit under it, there's no limit to the power it can generate.
Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
I will not pretend that if I had to choose between communism and Nazism I would choose communism.
Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol ... slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.
All men are created equal. Now matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.
The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy?
Something wonderful begins to happen with the simple realization that life, like an automobile, is driven from the inside out, not the other way around. As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present. Then, as you move around, try new things, and meet new people, you carry that sense of inner peace with you. It's absolutely true that, "Wherever you go, there you are.
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.
Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.