William Manchester · 800 pages
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“The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a Zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“They were following their prime minister, matching their government's mood.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“Nazi aggression, one might think, should have lent support to Winston’s candidacy. At this, of all times, it seems inconceivable that Baldwin would pick a weak man to supervise the defense of England. Nevertheless, that was what he did. Baldwin said outright: “If I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross.” In his biography of Chamberlain, Keith Feiling writes that the Rhineland was “decisive against Winston’s appointment”; it was “obvious that Hitler would not like it.” As the prime minister’s heir apparent, Chamberlain encouraged Baldwin to think along these lines. He suggested that Baldwin choose a man “who would excite no enthusiasm” and “create no jealousies.” The prime minister agreed. On Saturday, March 14—exactly a week since German troops had crossed the Rhine—he announced that he was establishing, not a ministry of defense, but a ministry for coordination of defense. Its leader, the new cabinet member, would be Sir Thomas Inskip.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. “It makes no difference,” Winston replied wryly. “The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“Churchill warned them now: “When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But”—his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear—“your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
“éminence grise, the coalition government disciplined”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
William Manchester
Born place: in Springfield, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date April 1, 1922
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“A few more years of the same, though, and I got used to it: I would load entire libraries from country castles and city mansions, fine, rare, leather- and Morroco-bound books, load whole trains full, and as soon as a train had thirty cars, off it would go to Switzerland or Austria, one kilogram of rare books for the equivalent of one crown of convertible currency, and nobody blinked an eye, nobody shed a tear, not even I myself, no, all I did was stand there smiling as I watched the train hauling those priceless libraries off to Switzerland and Austria for one crown in convertible currency a kilo. By then I had mustered the strength to look upon misfortune with composure, to still my emotions, by then I had begun to understand the beauty of destruction and I loaded more and more freight cars, and more and more trains left the station heading west at one crown per kilogram, and as I stood there staring after the red lantern hanging from the last car, as I stood there leaning on a lamppost like Leonardo da Vinci, who stood leaning on a column and looking on while French soldiers used his statue for target practice, shooting away horse and rider bit by bit, I thought how Leonardo, like me, standing and witnessing such horrors with complete composure, had realized even than that neither the heavens are humane nor is any man with a head on his shoulders.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, quote from Too Loud a Solitude
“Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
“The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, quote from The Law
“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”
― James C. Collins, quote from Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
“When you struggle against this moment, you’re actually struggling against the entire universe.”
― Deepak Chopra, quote from The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams
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