Quotes from the 1900–1945

Roosevelt's rule for power: stay calm and polite, but have real strength ready. He called it a West African proverb, though no such proverb has been found.

Part of Santayana's argument that progress depends on memory. He was writing about how individuals and societies learn, not giving a warning specifically about politics or war.

A summary of Voltaire's attitude written by an English biographer in 1906. She later explained that she never meant it as a quotation.

A teacher's influence passes from student to student and generation to generation, so no one can say where it ends.

Roosevelt's defense of people who try and fail over critics who never try. It was part of a long speech in Paris about the duties of citizens in a democracy.

Gandhi did write that changing ourselves changes how the world treats us. The neat one-line slogan is a modern paraphrase that does not appear anywhere in his writings.

In Frost's poem, a farmer's neighbor repeats an old saying while they rebuild the stone wall between them. The speaker doubts it. The poem asks the question instead of answering it.

The dead of the First World War speak from their graves among the poppies, asking the living to carry on their cause and not break faith with them.

A traveler picks one of two paths that were “really about the same,” then imagines telling the story years later as if the choice made all the difference. It is a poem about how we tell stories about our choices.

Parents bring children into the world and love them, but do not own them. Children have their own thoughts and their own future, and a parent's job is to send them forward, like a bow sending an arrow.

Einstein rejected the idea that quantum mechanics is fundamentally random. “God” was his way of talking about the laws of nature, not a personal God.

A modern summary of Aristotle's ethics by the American historian Will Durant. The idea is Aristotle's; the sentence is Durant's.

Einstein says knowledge is limited to what we already understand, while imagination reaches beyond it. He was describing how he made discoveries.

Said to a country in the depths of the Great Depression, days before he closed the banks. It was a plea to stop a panic that was making the crisis worse, not a general saying about bravery.

An empowering line credited to Eleanor Roosevelt during her lifetime. It has never been found in her columns, books or speeches, so its true origin is unknown.

A teenager thinks his father knows nothing. A few years later, grown up, he realizes his father was wise all along. The joke is that it was the son who changed.

Churchill's first promise as Prime Minister was not victory but hardship. He told Parliament the truth about the war ahead and asked for its support anyway.

Churchill's tribute to the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, a few thousand airmen defending a nation of millions.

Churchill's promise, right after the Dunkirk evacuation, that Britain would never surrender even if invaded. He paired it with a blunt warning that Dunkirk was a defeat, not a victory.

A line about inner character mattering more than past or future. It was written in 1940 by Henry Stanley Haskins, not by Emerson, who died in 1882.