1940

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

1940

★ 7.1

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

1940

★ 7.0

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

1940

★ 6.9

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Always let your conscience be your guide.

1940

★ 6.9

Film · Animation (film) · Musical (film) · Animation · Musical

Jiminy Cricket

Pinocchio · 1940

★ 6.9

Song · Film · Animation (film) · Musical (film) · Animation · Musical

When you wish upon a star, Makes no difference who you are, Anything your heart desires will come to you.

Jiminy Cricket

Pinocchio · 1940

★ 6.9

Poster

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war.

Charles de Gaulle

1940

★ 6.2

Film · Animation (film) · Musical (film) · Animation · Musical

A lie keeps growing and growing, until it's as plain as the nose on your face.

The Blue Fairy

Pinocchio · 1940

★ 6.0

Scientific literature

If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar, has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.

James Jeans

An Introduction to the Kinetic Theory of Gases · 1940

★ 5.9

Film · Romantic comedy (film) · Romantic comedy

The time to make up your mind about people is never.

Tracy Lord

The Philadelphia Story · 1940

★ 5.6

Poem

Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our table.

W.H. Auden

1940

★ 5.3

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Henry S. Haskins

1940

★ 5.1

It is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it: if you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other you are very likely to get what you want.

W. Somerset Maugham

1940

★ 5.1

Essay · Magazine · Scientific literature

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Science and Linguistics · 1940

★ 5.0

Essay · Political literature

Warfare... Is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.

Margaret Mead

1940

★ 4.5

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

Simone Weil

1940

★ 4.4

Film · Animation (film) · Musical (film) · Animation · Musical

Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday, you will be a real boy.

The Blue Fairy

Pinocchio · 1940

★ 4.4

Personal journal

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

1940

★ 3.8

There are no second acts in American lives.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

1940

★ 3.8

Religious literature

Helen Keller

1940

★ 3.8

We must be the great arsenal of democracy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1940

★ 3.8

Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1940

★ 3.8

Personal journal

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

1940

★ 3.7

What is our policy?... To wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.

Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.

1940

★ 3.7

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

Tom Joad

The Grapes of Wrath · 1940

★ 3.7

Letter

The wise and tragic sense of life. By this I mean...the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not "happiness and pleasure" but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

1940

★ 3.6

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Graham Greene

The Power and the Glory · 1940

★ 3.6

Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like living in jail.

Richard Wright

Native Son · 1940

★ 3.6

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Richard Wright

Native Son · 1940

★ 3.6

Radio broadcast

Since those whose duty it was to hold the sword of France have let it fall, I have picked up its broken point.

Charles de Gaulle

1940

★ 3.6

Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible.

1940

★ 3.6

What is our aim?... Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

He had a theory that if you should find one perfect thing, or place or person, you should stick to it. Do you think that's very silly?

1940

★ 3.6

Film · Romantic drama · Psychological thriller (film) · Psychological thriller

Mrs. de Winter

Rebecca · 1940

★ 3.6

Inscription

Work liberates.

Anonymous

1940

★ 3.5

Luck, if you will, is something you work for, and the harder you work the more luck you have.

Esther Eberstadt Brooke

1940

★ 3.5

Novel · Detective fiction

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

Raymond Chandler

1940

★ 3.5

Speech

The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

Douglas MacArthur

1940

★ 3.5

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say.

Jim Casy

The Grapes of Wrath · 1940

★ 3.5

All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

Eleanor Roosevelt

1940

★ 2.8

Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not and shall not die.

Charles de Gaulle

Appeal of 18 June · 1940

★ 2.8

The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1940

★ 2.8

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

G.H. Hardy

A Mathematician's Apology · 1940

★ 2.5

Autobiography and memoir

For poems are like rainbows: they escape you quickly.

Langston Hughes

1940

★ 2.2

Speech

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein

1940

★ 2.1

Film · Romantic comedy (film) · Romantic comedy

Champagne's funny stuff. I'm used to whisky. Whiskey is a slap on the back and champagne's heavy mist before my eyes.

Macaulay Connor

The Philadelphia Story · 1940

★ 2.1

Essay

In order to be content men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers.

Albert Einstein

1940

★ 2.0

Essay

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea.

George Orwell

1940

★ 2.0

Novel · Detective fiction

Law is where you buy it in this town.

Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely · 1940

★ 1.9