Quotes About Resilience

I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter; I have retained something which is to me of great value Ã¢â'¬â€œ I can still walk about the world with my head erect.'235 'My dear Duff,' Churchill wrote to him, 'Your speech was one of the finest Parliamentary performances I have ever heard. It was admirable in form, massive in argument and shone with courage and public spirit.'236

He privately remarked that Boothby 'should join a bomb disposal squad as the best way of rehabilitating himself in the eyes of his fellow men. After all, the bombs might not go off.'133 It sounded cruel, but that is much what he himself had done in 1915, when the six-week average life-expectancy for new officers on the Western Front was not dissimilar to that of bomb-disposal squads in the Second World War.

the message 'Stay put' which would be sent out by the Ministry of Information in the event of a German invasion. 'First of all, it is American slang; secondly, it does not express the fact. The people have not been "put" anywhere. What is the matter with "Stand fast", or "Stand firm"? Of the two I prefer the latter.

We don't let them rest,' said General Kurt Wallenius of the Finnish Northern Army; 'we don't let them sleep. This is a war of numbers against brains.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

There is something rather wonderful about the fact that, at a particularly perilous point in a war for the continued independent existence of the nation, the British Prime Minister could be upbraided by his wife for being short tempered; we can be fairly certain that no one was saying this to Churchill's opposite number in the Reich Chancellery.

take it.' London could take anything. My heart goes

More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood.

Disaster and treating 'those two impostors just the same'. She added, 'Remember that

I have never been seduced by prosperity; adversity shall find me superior to its blows.'79

Churchill had an extraordinary capacity for alcohol and it rarely affected his judgement.

It was a measure of Napoleon's resilience and resourcefulness – and of the confidence that he still commanded – that having returned from Russia with only 10,000 effectives from his central invading force, he was able within four months to field an army of 151,000 men for the Elbe campaign, with many more to come.

Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,' he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, 'but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct.

They looked like scarecrows,' Slim said of his troops. 'But they looked like soldiers, too.' He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk.

Sometimes the world's most brilliant ideas don't work. Doesn't make them any less insightful.

Paralyzing fear. Nothing for you to worry about.

Hope can be a source of strength, but when it fails to deliver what I want, I've found a good degree of stubbornness to be an appropriate substitute.

I don't know why I have a pattern of running into hand-destroying situations, but that seems to be my lot in life.

I don't know why I have a pattern of running into hand-destroying situations, but that seems to be my lot in life. Maybe I need to figure out how to make magical prosthetics. I should research that later.

I hurt like someone had decided to play the drums on my ribs with a mace, but I didn't think anything was actually broken. That might sound a little strange, given that this monster had both the mass and the general disposition of a siege engine, but I'd never actually managed to find anything that could break my bones.

Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?

Adapt or die. Some

You cannot stay in the self-actualized mode if you're always worried about failure.

Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change.