Winston Churchill Quotes

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

When you forgive, you in no way change the past - but you sure do change the future.

We must ask people to forget about the past and to live for the future.

We must forget the past.

Although the troops have struck us, we throw it all behind and are glad to meet you in peace and friendship.

Without forgiveness, there's no future.

Forget like a child any injury done by somebody immediately. Never keep it in the heart. It kindles hatred.

My way of thinking is to create a situation where we rally everyone together and create peace and pardon people, to not forget about the past - because we need to learn from it - but to mainly think about the future.

Forgiveness means letting go of the past.

When I'm speaking of love, when I'm speaking of reversing hate, I'm speaking not only of reconciliation - even I don't use that word - I use another word in Spanish, that's called 'reencuentro' - it's not reconciliation.

There has been enough blood in the Balkans. Serbia is offering its hand. Let us turn to the future and not deal with the past.

Reconciliation does not mean covering history with a blanket. Reconciliation means truth, justice and love. Justice without love can degenerate into vengeance. We need to know the truth for medicinal reasons, so that what happened … will never happen again.

We shall prepare the coffee of reconciliation through the filter of justice. Through reconciliation, streams of tears will come to our eyes.

A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If a man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.

It is by no means surprising that prejudices and resentments, which for years were so assiduously cultivated and so violently inflamed, should not have been turned into affection by a defeat; nor are they likely to disappear as long as the southern people continue to brood over their losses and misfortunes. They will gradually subside when those who entertain them cut resolutely loose from the past and embark in a career of new activity on a common field with those whom they have so long considered their enemies.

You can’t build a united nation on the basis of revenge.

Prosecute? I am not interested in prosecuting. I am interested in building a nation.

Forgiving is giving up the wish that things could have been different. They weren't. That's the past. Let it go.

It is not enjoined upon us to forget, but we are told to forgive, our enemies.

Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.

The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine... And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.

Forgive, but don't forget

Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness.

There's a lot of bitterness, there's a lot of anger out there. We all have to work hard to heal those wounds.