Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!

I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget... we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat... All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness... We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that... Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

Well, dinner would have been splendid... if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.

The pictorial battlefield becomes a sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war.

Watch your character for your character is your destiny.

The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them. [...] Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.

Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offense.