🔰IF, Rudyard Kipling's poem, recited by Sir Michael Caine

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowances for their doubting too, if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about don't deal in lies, or being hated don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good nor look too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same, if you can hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life for broken, and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools, if you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose and start again at the beginning, and never breathe a word about your loss, if you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are done, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you but none too much, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 40 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more, you'll be a man my son. The Kipling poem is one of my favorites since I was a boy at school, my father read it to me once, and I think it to me as a little boy it summed up what a man should be, and later on when I became an actor there were a couple of lines in there that affected me, one was if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same, it's a very good thing for an actor because an actor's life doesn't consist of any medium things, everything is either a hit or absolute disaster, so there was that one, and then there is another line which is if you can hear the words you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, well that's the press as far as actors are concerned, because you're always saying something and you go wait a minute I never said that, and so it stayed with me all my life right until this very day, the war for a start took my dad away for six years, I never forgave him for that, war disrupts everything, I was evacuated on my own and ill-treated and all that, everything went wrong, peace, things go right, I was a soldier when I was 19, I spent my 19th year in Korea as a fusilier infantryman, and so I know what I'm talking about when I talk about war, and it's the most disgusting thing that you could ever think of, and I've also noticed with every single war, it's been declared by men who are too old to go, and it's made me suspicious.