“The only reason from beginning to end is that our foreign office is anti-German and that the Admiralty was anxious to seize any opportunity for using the Navy in battle practice. … Never did we arm our people and ask them to give us their lives for less good cause than this.”
Leicester Pioneer (7 August 1914), quoted in The Times (9 April 1918), p. 8 and The Times (18 January 1924), p. 14
1910s
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Ramsay MacDonald 27
British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom 1866–1937Related quotes

Newsreel interview (spring 1931), quoted in John Ramsden, A History of the Conservative Party: The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940 (1978), p. 320
1931

To Jack Bell of the Chicago Daily News, as quoted in Scoop : An Historical Adventure (2006) by James H. Walters, p. 34.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 10.

Interview with Claud Cockburn, as quoted in “Mr. Capone, Philosopher,” Cockburn Sums Up (1981)

“Never give any cause the opportunity to make the will to live die in you.”
Original: Non dare mai a nessuna causa l'opportunità di far morire in te la voglia di vivere.
Source: prevale.net

Our concern, our duty, is our people and our blood. We can be indifferent to everything else. I wish the S.S. to adopt this attitude towards the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians....
The Posen speech to SS officers (6 October 1943)
1940s

“Difficulties give us the opportunity to prove our greatness by overcoming them.”
Message dictated to Sanjeeva Reddy at Guruprasad (6 June 1960), as quoted in The God-Man : The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an Interpretation of His Silence and Spiritual Teaching (1964) by Charles Benjamin Purdom, p. 353 <!-- also quoted in The Silent Master : Meher Baba, Avatar of the Age (1987), by Irwin Luck, p. 15 -->
General sources
Context: It is better to deny God, than to defy God.
Sometimes our weakness is considered strength, and we take delight in borrowed greatness.
To profess to be a lover of God and then to be dishonest to God, to the world and to himself, is unparalleled hypocrisy. Difficulties give us the opportunity to prove our greatness by overcoming them.

No. 43
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)