“Pessimism never won any battle.”

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), The Defeated Ones

Source: The Fires of Heaven

A Battle For Life (July 1958)
Context: The battle to save life is still going on. Up till now Lao Chiu has already lived for forty-four days. He lives on stubbornly and endures all suffering. Already he has become a banner, a fresh red banner. Many people regard him as a source of encouragement and as a model for them. Many consider him as a personification of the noble qualities of the working class and as a shining example of the great spirit of communism.
This battle to save life will eventually be won. The fact that Lao Chiu has lived until now is already a medical marvel. He has passed through one crisis after another and later he may face still more. But he will certainly live. Blind faith in established experience has been shattered, outmoded regulations have been smashed.

Source: Leaves of Grass

As quoted in The New York Times (26 December 1886), and in Words on Wellington (1889) by Sir William Fraser, this is almost certainly apocryphal. The first attributions of such a remark to Wellington were in De l'Avenir politique de l'Angleterre (1856) by Charles de Montalembert, Ch. 10, where it is stated that on returning to Eton in old age he had said: "C'est ici qu'a été gagnée la bataille de Waterloo." This was afterwards quoted in Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles as "It was there that the Battle of Waterloo was won!" Later in Memoirs of Eminent Etonians (2nd Edition, 1876) by Sir Edward Creasy, he is quoted as saying as he passed groups playing cricket on the playing-fields: "There grows the stuff that won Waterloo."
Elizabeth Longford in Wellington — The Years of the Sword (1969) states he "probably never said or thought anything of the kind" and Gerald Wellesley, 7th Duke of Wellington in a letter published in The Times in 1972 is quoted as stating: "During his old age Wellington is recorded to have visited Eton on two occasions only and it is unlikely that he came more often. … Wellington's career at Eton was short and inglorious and, unlike his elder brother, he had no particular affection for the place. … Quite apart from the fact that the authority for attributing the words to Wellington is of the flimsiest description, to anyone who knows his turn of phrase they ring entirely false."
Misattributed

Source: Surfacing

Source: War and Peace

Arjuna Ranatunga on Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, Sachin Tendulkar: Quotable quotes on the batting legend http://www.khaleejtimes.com/article/20131112/ARTICLE/311129977/1051.

Georg Alexander von Müller's diary entry (23 March 1918) after the first German successes of the Spring Offensive, quoted in Georg Alexander von Müller, The Kaiser and His Court (London: Macdonald, 1961), p. 344
1910s