“A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.”

Report on the Potsdam Conference (1945)
Context: Any man who sees Europe now must realize that victory in a great war is not something you win once and for all, like victory in a ball game. Victory in a great war is something that must be won and kept won. It can be lost after you have won it — if you are careless or negligent or indifferent.
Europe today is hungry. I am not talking about Germans. I am talking about the people of the countries which were overrun and devastated by the Germans, and particularly about the people of Western Europe. Many of them lack clothes and fuel and tools and shelter and raw materials. They lack the means to restore their cities and their factories.
As the winter comes on, the distress will increase. Unless we do what we can to help, we may lose next winter what we won at such terrible cost last spring. Desperate men are liable to destroy the structure of their society to find in the wreckage some substitute for hope. If we let Europe go cold and hungry, we may lose some of the foundations of order on which the hope for worldwide peace must rest.
We must help to the limits of our strength. And we will.

Robert Henry Thurston, " The Growth of the Steam Engine https://books.google.nl/books?id=dywDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA17," in: Popular Science, Nov 1877, p. 11

1940s, Victory broadcast (1945)
Context: Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain with death — the seas bear only commerce — men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world lies quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way.

Letter to John Croker (8 August 1815), as quoted in The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848) by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Volume I Chapter 5 http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/european/TheHistoryofEnglandfromtheAccessionofJamesIIVol1/chap5.html, p. 180.; and in The Waterloo Letters (1891) edited by H. T. Sibome

Source: The Fires of Heaven

[2006-06-08, Ryan Statement on Death of Terrorist al-Zarqawi, paulryan.house.gov, http://paulryan.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=246756, 2012-09-30]
in reaction to the killing of militant Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

'Mr. Bush. These decisions and statements will only lead you to the garbage can of history.' http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=37 April 2004

Letter to Colonel Valentine Walton (5 July 1644)