Winston Churchill Quotes

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May these Winston Churchill quotes on perseverance inspire you to never give up and keep working towards your goals. Who knows—success could be just around the corner.

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Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician, army officer, and writer. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, when he led Britain to victory in the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

…a prospective surplus is always a milestone in a budget. – Winston Churchill

A cat will look down to a man. A dog will look up to a man. But a pig will look you straight in the eye and see his equal. – Winston Churchill

A country which tries to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and endeavouring to lift himself up by the handle. – Winston Churchill

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. – Winston Churchill

A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. – Winston Churchill

A joke is a very serious thing. – Winston Churchill

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. – Winston Churchill

A lie gets halfway around the world before truth has the chance to get its pants on. – Winston Churchill

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril. – Winston Churchill

A love of tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril but the new view must come, the world must roll forward. – Winston Churchill

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

A modest man, who has much to be modest about. -Winston Churchill (On Clement Atlee)

A nation that forgets its past has no future. – Winston Churchill

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. -Winston Churchill

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen. – Winston Churchill

A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. – Winston Churchill

A sheep in sheep’s clothing. -Winston Churchill (On Clement Atlee)

(Prime Minister Joseph) Chamberlain loves the working man – he loves to see him work. – Winston Churchill

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure. – Winston Churchill

Advertising mourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production. – Winston Churchill

Air power can either paralyze the enemy’s military action or compel him to devote to the defense of his bases and communications a share of his straitened resources far greater that what we need in the attack. – Winston Churchill

All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. – Winston Churchill

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes. – Winston Churchill

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope – Winston S. Churchill

All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour; duty; mercy; hope.- Winston S. Churchill

All wisdom is not new wisdom. – Winston Churchill

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement. – Winston Churchill

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed. – Winston Churchill

Always remember however sure you are that you can easily win that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a choice. – Winston Churchill

Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal. – Winston Churchill

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. – Winston S. Churchill

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain. – Winston Churchill

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains. – Winston Churchill

Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat. – Winston Churchill

Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict? For it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation andour altar. – Winston Churchill

As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will, victory will not be denied us. – Winston Churchill

At every crisis the Kaiser crumpled. In defeat he fled; in revolution he abdicated; in exile he remarried. – Winston Churchill

At the beginning of this war, megalomania was the only form of sanity. – Winston Churchill

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. – Winston Churchill

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point. – Winston Churchill

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. – Winston S. Churchill

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself, believe. – Winston S. Churchill

Bessie Braddock: Sir, you are drunk.
Churchill: Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.-Winston Churchill

Beware the sleeping dragon. For when she awakes the Earth will shake [On China]. – Winston Churchill

Bolshevism is a great evil…arisen out of great social evils. – Winston Churchill

Broadly speaking, short words are best and the old words when short, are best of all. – Winston Churchill

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all. – Winston S. Churchill

By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverest boys . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the normal British sentence – which is a noble thing. – Winston Churchill

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach. – Winston Churchill

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones. – Winston Churchill

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection. – Winston Churchill

Civilization will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe. – Winston Churchill

Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential. – Winston S. Churchill

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend. – Winston Churchill

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others. – Winston Churchill

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others. -Winston Churchill

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.- Winston S. Churchill

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. – Winston Churchill

Craft is common both to skill and deceit. – Winston Churchill

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary, it fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. – Winston Churchill

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop. – Winston Churchill

Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it! – Winston Churchill

Danger — if you meet it promptly and without flinching — you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never! – Winston Churchill

Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill

Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry. – Winston Churchill

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry. – Winston Churchill

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. – Winston Churchill

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won. – Winston S. Churchill

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions. – Winston Churchill

Direct taxation was a great corrector of extravagance. – Winston Churchill

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old. – Winston Churchill

Do not let us speak of darker days; let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived. – Winston Churchill

Don’t interrupt me while I’m interrupting. – Winston Churchill

Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash. – Winston Churchill

Doubts [can] be swept away only by deeds. – Winston Churchill

Dull, Duller, Dulles. – Winston Churchill (of John Foster Dulles)

[And a pamphlet called] Pick me up … There is no genuine hatred against Herr Hitler. – Winston Churchill

Each beat guides me in Your direction. – Winston Churchill

Eating words has never given me indigestion. – Winston Churchill

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. – Winston Churchill

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Winston Churchill

Envisage—an unpleasant and overworked word. – Winston Churchill

Every day you make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb. – Winston Churchill

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb. – Winston Churchill

Every man should ask himself each day whether he is not too readily accepting negative solutions. – Winston Churchill

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others. -Winston Churchill

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage. – Winston S. Churchill

Evils can be created much quicker than they can be cured. – Winston Churchill

Fanatic. One who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. – Winston Churchill

Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision. – Winston Churchill

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history of myself. – Winston Churchill

For myself I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use to be anything else. – Winston Churchill

France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core. – Winston Churchill

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put. -Winston Churchill

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.-Winston Churchill

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job – Winston Churchill

God for a month of power and a good shorthand writer! – Winston Churchill

Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill- designed for the purpose. – Winston Churchill

Good and great are seldom in the same man. – Winston Churchill

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. – Winston Churchill

Great and good are seldom the same man. – Winston Churchill

Harsh laws are at times better than no laws at all. – Winston Churchill

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches. – Winston Churchill

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. – Winston Churchill

He is a modest little man who has a good deal to be modest about. – Winston Churchill

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing happened. – Winston Churchill

He spoke without a note, and almost without a point. – Winston Churchill—1931 (about William Graham MP)

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have. – Winston Churchill

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. – Winston Churchill

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt… We shall not fail or falter we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job. – Winston Churchill

History is written by the victors. – Winston Churchill

History will be kind for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. -Winston Churchill

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 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!’ – Winston Churchill

Honours should go where death and danger go. – Winston Churchill

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. – Winston S. Churchill

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic. – Winston Churchill

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the people that was his message. – Winston Churchill

I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. – Winston Churchill

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else. – Winston Churchill

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod. – Winston Churchill

I am easily satisfied with the very best. – Winston Churchill

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. – Winston Churchill

I am most anxious that in dealing with matters which every Member knows are extremely delicate matters, I should not use any phrase or expression which would cause offence to our friends and Allies on the Continent or across the Atlantic Ocean. – Winston Churchill

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting. – Winston Churchill

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter. – Winston Churchill

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter. -Winston Churchill

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter. – Winston Churchill

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.’ – Winston Churchill

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. – Winston Churchill

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. – Winston Churchill

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interests. – Winston Churchill

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. – Winston Churchill

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley. – Winston Churchill

I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality. – Winston Churchill

I don’t see why not, young man. You look reasonably fit to me. – Winston Churchill

I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial. – Winston Churchill

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic. – Winston Churchill

I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents. – Winston Churchill

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk. – Winston Churchill

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said, namely that I have inspired the nation. It was the nation and the race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. – Winston Churchill

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it. – Winston Churchill

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words. – Winston Churchill

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. – Winston Churchill

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. – Winston S. Churchill, ‘Alone: The Second World War’

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. – Winston Churchill

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. – Winston Churchill

I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. – Winston Churchill

I never take pleasure in human woe. – Winston Churchill

I never worry about action, but only about inaction – Winston Churchill

I never worry about action, but only inaction. – Winston Churchill

I never worry about action, only inaction. – Winston Churchill

I object on principle to doing by legislation what properly belongs to human good feeling and charity. – Winston Churchill

I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself. – Winston Churchill

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact. – Winston Churchill

I shall always be glad to have seen it-for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon-namely, that it will be unnecessary ever to see it again. – Winston Churchill

I was never tired of listening to his wisdom or imparting my own. – Winston Churchill

I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar. – Winston Churchill

I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. – Winston Churchill

I will not pretend that if I had to choose between communism and Nazism I would choose communism. – Winston Churchill

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, `I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ – Winston Churchill

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is 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. – Winston Churchill

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks. – Winston Churchill

I’d form a alliance with the devil himself if helped defeat Hitler. – Winston Churchill

I’d rather argue against a hundred idiots, than have one agree with me. – Winston Churchill

If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea. – Winston Churchill

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. -Winston Churchill

If I was your wife Sir, I’d poison you! Madam, if you were my wife, I’d let you! – Winston Churchill

If one has to submit, it is wasteful not to do so with the best grace possible.- Winston S. Churchill

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire. – Winston Churchill

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another – Winston Churchill

If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised. – Winston Churchill

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future. –Winston Churchill

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find that we have lost the future. – Winston Churchill

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future. – Winston Churchill

If we win, nobody will care. If we lose, there will be nobody to care. – Winston Churchill

If you are going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

If you are going to go through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

If you are not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at forty, you have no brain. – Winston Churchill

If you destroy a free market you create a black market. – Winston Churchill

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce. – Winston Churchill

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack. – Winston Churchill

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it. – Winston Churchill

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. -Winston Churchill

If you mean to profit, learn to please. – Winston Churchill

If you simply take up the attitude of defending a mistake, there will no hope of improvement. – Winston Churchill

[Lady Nancy Astor:] Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee. … Nancy, if you were my wife, I’d drink it. – Winston Churchill

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. -Winston Churchill

If you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks. – Winston Churchill

Immature love says, I love you because I need you, mature love says, I need you because I love you. – Winston Churchill

In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable. – Winston Churchill

In Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old. – Winston Churchill

In my belief, you cannot deal with the most serious things in the world unless you also understand the most amusing. – Winston Churchill

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet. – Winston Churchill

In those days he was wiser than he is now — he used frequently to take my advice. – Winston Churchill

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice. – Winston Churchill

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might. – Winston Churchill

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times. – Winston Churchill

In war, as in life, it is often necessary, when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might. – Winston Churchill

In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity. – Winston Churchill

In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill. – Winston Churchill

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. – Winston Churchill

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome. – Winston Churchill

It becomes still more difficult to reconcile Japanese action with prudence or even sanity. What kind of people do they think we are? – Winston Churchill

It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude. – Winston Churchill

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -Winston Churchill

It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right. – Winston Churchill

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. -Winston Churchill

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more. – Winston Churchill

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. – Winston S. Churchill

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. – Winston Churchill

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses. – Winston Churchill

It is all right to rat, but you can’t re-rat. – Winston Churchill

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter. – Winston Churchill

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic. – Winston Churchill

It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don’t believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it. – Winston Churchill

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive. – Winston Churchill

It is no part of my case that I am always right. – Winston Churchill

It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.- Winston S. Churchill

It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary. – Winston Churchill

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required. – Winston Churchill

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace. – Winston Churchill

It is not in our power to anticipate our destiny. – Winston Churchill

It is the time to dare and endure. – Winston Churchill

It is wonderful what great strides can be made when there is a resolute purpose behind them.- Winston S. Churchill

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation. – Winston Churchill

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required. – Winston Churchill

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. – Winston S. Churchill

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds. – Winston Churchill

Keep buggering on. – Winston Churchill

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. – Winston Churchill

Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it. – Winston S. Churchill

Kites rise highest against the wind—not with it. – Winston Churchill

Lady Astor: Sir, if you were my husband I would put arsenic in your tea!
Churchill: If I were your husband I would drink it! – Winston Churchill

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. – Winston Churchill

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

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ”This was their finest hour.” – Winston Churchill

Life can either be accepted or changed. If it is not accepted, it must be changed. If it cannot be changed, then it must be accepted. – Winston Churchill

Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut. – Winston Churchill

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom. – Winston Churchill

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. – Winston Churchill

Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it. – Winston Churchill

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. – Winston Churchill

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. – Winston Churchill

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened. – Winston Churchill

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. – Winston Churchill

Moral of the Work. In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill. – Winston Churchill

Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth. Most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened. – Winston Churchill

Mr Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about. – Winston Churchill

Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea!’ And if you were my wife, I would drink it! – Winston Churchill

Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right. – Winston Churchill

Mr. Jorrocks described fox hunting as providing all the glory of war with only 33 percent of its danger. – Winston Churchill

My education was interrupted only by my schooling. – Winston Churchill

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me. – Winston Churchill

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me. – Winston Churchill

My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best. – Winston S. Churchill

My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked. – Winston Churchill

Nancy Astor: Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.
Churchill: If I were your husband I would take it. -Winston Churchill

Nationalization of industry is the doom of trade unionism. – Winston Churchill

Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never, never — in nothing great or small, large or petty. Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. – Winston Churchill

Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. – Winston Churchill

Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about. – Winston Churchill

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room. – Winston Churchill

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

Never trust a man who doesn’t drink. – Winston Churchill

Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. – Winston Churchill

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. – Winston Churchill

Never, never, never give in! – Winston S. Churchill

Never, never, never give up. – Winston Churchill

Never, never, never, never give up. – Winston Churchill

Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. –Winston S. Churchill

Never…was so much owed by so many to so few. – Winston Churchill

No comment is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again. – Winston Churchill

No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong. – Winston Churchill

No crime is so great as daring to excel. – Winston Churchill

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. – Winston Churchill

No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle. – Winston S. Churchill

No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt. – Winston Churchill

No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it. – Winston Churchill

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill

No two on earth in all things can agree. All have some daring singularity. – Winston Churchill

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization. – Winston Churchill

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. – Winston S. Churchill

Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance. – Winston Churchill

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling ones pulse and taking ones temperature. I see that a speaker at the week-end said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture. – Winston Churchill

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result. – Winston Churchill

Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library. – Winston Churchill

Nothing will bring American sympathy along with us so much as American blood shed in the field. – Winston Churchill

Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise. I am not going to be henpecked into a question of such importance. – Winston Churchill

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. – Winston Churchill

Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened. -Winston Churchill

Once upon a time all the animals in the zoo decided that they would disarm, and they arranged to have a conference to arrange the matter. So the Rhinoceros said when he opened the proceedings that the use of teeth was barbarous and horrible and ought to be strictly prohibited by general consent. Horns, which were mainly defensive weapons, would, of course, have to be allowed. The Buffalo, the Stag, the Porcupine, and even the little Hedgehog all said they would vote with the Rhino, but the Lion and the Tiger took a different view. They defended teeth and even claws, which they described as honourable weapons of immemorial antiquity. The Panther, the Leopard, the Puma, and the whole tribe of small cats all supported the Lion and the Tiger. Then the Bear spoke. He proposed that both teeth and horns should be banned and never used again for fighting by any animal. It would be quite enough if animals were allowed to give each other a good hug when they quarreled. No one could object to that. It was so fraternal, and that would be a great step towards peace. However, all the other animals were very offended with the Bear, and the Turkey fell into a perfect panic. The discussion got so hot and angry, and all those animals began thinking so much about horns and teeth and hugging when they argued about the peaceful intentions that had brought them together that they began to look at one another in a very nasty way. Luckily the keepers were able to calm them down and persuade them to go back quietly to their cages, and they began to feel quite friendly with one another again. – Winston Churchill

[Playing golf is] like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture. – Winston Churchill

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’. – Winston Churchill

One man with conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions. – Winston Churchill

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never! – Winston Churchill

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. – Winston Churchill

One ought to be just before one is generous. – Winston Churchill

One woman who managed to corner him, the story runs, said in a treacly gushing voice:Doesnt it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you make a speech the hall is packed to overflowing?It is quite flattering, Mr. Churchill replied, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that if instead of making a political speech I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big. – Winston Churchill

Opening amenities are often opening inanities. – Winston Churchill

Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow. – Winston Churchill

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge. – Winston Churchill

Patience is sorrow’s salve. – Winston Churchill

People imagine that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin arrived in Yalta with a blank sheet of paper to decide the fate of Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. – Winston Churchill

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong. – Winston Churchill

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. – Winston S. Churchill

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential. – Winston Churchill

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game. – Winston Churchill

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times. – Winston Churchill

Politics is more dangerous than war, for in war you are only killed once. – Winston Churchill

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business. – Winston Churchill

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen. – Winston Churchill

Responsibility is the price of greatness. – Winston Churchill

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. About Russia – Winston Churchill

Safari, so goody. – Winston Churchill

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down. – Winston Churchill

Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending – sit down. – Winston Churchill

Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all. – Winston Churchill

So they the Government go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. – Winston Churchill

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. -Winston Churchill

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. – Winston Churchill

Socialism is like a dream. Sooner or later you wake up to reality. – Winston Churchill

Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice. – Winston Churchill

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong. – Winston Churchill

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party. – Winston Churchill

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. – Winston Churchill

Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is–the strong horse that pulls the whole cart. – Winston Churchill

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon. – Winston Churchill

Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required. – Winston Churchill

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves. – Winston Churchill

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Success is bounding from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Success is never final. – Winston Churchill

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts. – Winston Churchill

Success is never found. Failure is never fatal. Courage is the only thing. – Winston Churchill

Success is not final, failure is not fatal it is the courage to continue that counts. – Winston Churchill

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves, and to save all those who rely upon you. You have only the right to go on, and at the end of the road, be it short or long, victory and honor will be found. – Winston Churchill

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves. – Winston Churchill

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip. – Winston S. Churchill

The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives. – Winston Churchill

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. – Winston S. Churchill

The British Constitution is mainly British common sense. – Winston Churchill

The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. – Winston Churchill

The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it. There is another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modern it dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: The tail of China is large and will not be wagged. I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honour to be addressing you at this moment. – Winston Churchill

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pygmies will now start to squabble. – Winston Churchill

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. – Winston Churchill

The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable. – Winston Churchill

The English never draw a line without blurring it. – Winston Churchill

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. – Winston Churchill

The first duty of the university is to teach wisdom, not a trade; character, not technicalities. We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers. – Winston Churchill

The First Sea Lord moves the fleet. No one else moves it. – Winston Churchill

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. – Winston Churchill

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes. – Winston S. Churchill

The heights of great men reached and kept, Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upwards in the night. – Winston Churchill

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. -Winston Churchill

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. – Winston Churchill

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England he should have said Britain, of course always wins one battle the last. – Winston Churchill

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age. – Winston Churchill

The maxim of the British people is ‘Business as usual.’ – Winston Churchill

The most important thing about education is appetite. – Winston Churchill

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground. – Winston Churchill

The nose of the bulldog has been slanted backwards so that he can breathe without letting go. – Winston Churchill

The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked with the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor. – Winston Churchill

The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash. – Winston Churchill

The optimist was the man who did not mind what happened so long as it did not happen to him. The pessimist was the man who lived with the optimist. – Winston Churchill

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. – Winston Churchill

The poor girl does not know how to have a conversation. Unfortunately, she does know how to speak. – Winston Churchill

The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible. – Winston Churchill

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself. – Winston Churchill

The price of greatness is responsibility over each of your thoughts. – Winston Churchill

The price of greatness is responsibility. – Winston Churchill

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult. – Winston Churchill

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult. -Winston Churchill

The recognition of their language is precious to a small people. – Winston Churchill

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. – Winston Churchill

The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman’s speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss. – Winston Churchill

The substance of the eminent Socialist gentlemen’s speech is that making a profit is a sin. It is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss! – Winston Churchill

The substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind. – Winston Churchill

The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is. – Winston Churchill

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. – Winston Churchill

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. – Winston Churchill

The usefulness of a naval invention ceases when it is enjoyed by everyone else. – Winston Churchill

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong. – Winston Churchill

Their insatiable lust for power is only equaled by their incurable impotence in exercising it. – Winston Churchill

There are a lot of lies going around… and half of them are true. – Winston Churchill

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true. – Winston Churchill

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true. – Winston Churchill

There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided. – Winston Churchill

There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you. – Winston Churchill

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear something yes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the parade grounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italians going on maneuvers yes, only on maneuvers! – Winston Churchill

There is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions. – Winston Churchill

There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring. – Winston Churchill

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. – Winston Churchill

There is no such thing as a good tax. -Winston Churchill

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion. – Winston Churchill

There is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure. – Winston Churchill

There is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure. – Winston Churchill

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result. – Winston Churchill

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right. – Winston Churchill

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right. – Winston Churchill

There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man. – Winston Churchill

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. – Winston Churchill

There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table. – Winston Churchill

These are not dark days: these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived. – Winston Churchill

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. – Winston Churchill

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds. – Winston Churchill

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure. – Winston Churchill

This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end; this is just perhaps the end of the beginning. – Winston S. Churchill

This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. – Winston Churchill

This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put. – Winston Churchill

This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read. – Winston S. Churchill

This report, by its very length, defends itself against being read. – Winston Churchill

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read. – Winston Churchill

This was their finest hour. – Winston Churchill

Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. – Winston Churchill

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war. -Winston Churchill

Those who dealt in guineas were not usually of the impoverished class. – Winston Churchill (The guinea, 21 shillings or £1/1/0, was sometimes featured in snooty adverts promoting high-priced goods in guineas rather than pounds.)

Those who forget history are bound to repeat it – Winston Churchill

Thus, by every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill. – Winston Churchill

Thus, then, on the night of the tenth of May, at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs. – Winston Churchill

Time and money are largely interchangeable terms. – Winston Churchill

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day. – Winston S. Churchill

To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour. – Winston S. Churchill

To every man there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do a very special thing, unique to him and fitted to his talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for that which would be his finest hour. – Winston Churchill

To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!…Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. – Winston Churchill

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to change often. – Winston Churchill

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. – Winston Churchill

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war. – Winston Churchill

To meet Roosevelt with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence, was like opening a bottle of champagne. – Winston Churchill

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valor, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be. – Winston Churchill

Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: ‘We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.’ – Winston Churchill

Too often the strong silent man is silent because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent. – Winston Churchill

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent. It is only weak who shout. – Winston Churchill

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information. – Winston Churchill

Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is. – Winston Churchill

Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are. Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations. – Winston Churchill

Twice in my lifetime the long arm of destiny has reached across the oceans and involved the entire life and manhood of the United States in a deadly struggle.
There was no use in saying “We don’t want it; we won’t have it; our forebears left Europe to avoid these quarrels; we have founded a new world which has no contact with the old. “There was no use in that. The long arm reaches out remorselessly, and every one’s existence, environment, and outlook undergo a swift and irresistible change. What is the explanation, Mr. President, of these strange facts, and what are the deep laws to which they respond? I will offer you one explanation – there are others, but one will suffice. – Winston Churchill

Vengeance is the most costly and dissipating of luxuries. – Winston Churchill

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the hard may be; for without victory there is no survival. – Winston Churchill

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. – Winston Churchill

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can. – Winston Churchill

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. – Winston Churchill

War is very cruel. It goes on for so long. – Winston Churchill

War never pays its dividends in cash on the money it costs. – Winston Churchill

We (The British) have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy. – Winston Churchill

We are all worms, But I do believe that I am a glow worm. – Winston Churchill

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm. – Winston Churchill

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage. – Winston Churchill

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out. – Winston Churchill

We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls. – Winston Churchill

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty. – Winston Churchill

We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. -Winston Churchill

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. – Winston Churchill

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often. – Winston Churchill

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another. – Winston Churchill

We have all seen with a sense of nausea the abject, squalid, shameless avowal made in the Oxford Union. We are told that we ought not to treat it seriously. The Times talked of the children’s hour. I disagree. It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of Germany, Italy, and France when they read the message sent out by Oxford University in the name of Young England. Let them be assured that it is not the last word. But before they blame, as blame they should, these callow ill-tutored youths, they must be sure that they have not been set a bad example by people much older and much higher up. – Winston Churchill

We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy. – Winston S. Churchill

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. – Winston Churchill

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give. – Winston Churchill

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give. – Winston S. Churchill

We must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic. – Winston Churchill

We must beware of needless innovations, especially when guided by logic. – Winston Churchill

We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges. – Winston Churchill

We must just KBO (‘Keep Buggering On’). – Winston Churchill

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence. – Winston Churchill

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. – Winston Churchill

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. – Winston Churchill

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. – Winston Churchill

We shall not fail or falter we shall not weaken or tire…Give us the tools and we will finish the job. – Winston Churchill

We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job. – Winston Churchill

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 the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. And 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. – Winston Churchill

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it. – Winston Churchill

We shape our buildings and they shape us. – Winston Churchill

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. – Winston Churchill

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us. – Winston S. Churchill

We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us. – Winston Churchill

We will have no truce or parlay with you Hitler, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst — and we will do our best. – Winston Churchill

What is a fine person or a beauteous face, Unless deportment give them decent grace; Blessed with all other requisites to please, To want the striking elegance of ease; Awkward, embarrassed, stiff, without the skill Of moving gracefully, or standing. – Winston Churchill

What is adequacy? Adequacy is no standard at all. – Winston Churchill

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? – Winston Churchill

What kind of a people do they (Japan) think we are? Is it possible they do not realise that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget? – Winston Churchill

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to preserve against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget? – Winston Churchill

When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home. – Winston Churchill

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home. – Winston Churchill

When I look back on all the worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened. – Winston Churchill

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened. – Winston Churchill

When I warned them the French that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck! – Winston Churchill

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber. – Winston Churchill

When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone. – Winston S. Churchill

When you get to the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on. – Winston Churchill

When you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack. – Winston Churchill

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite. – Winston Churchill

When you’re 20 you care what everyone thinks, when you’re 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you’re 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place. You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. – Winston Churchill

When you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

Why you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, and the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together-and what do you get? The sum of their fears. – Winston Churchill

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed. – Winston Churchill

Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning. – Winston Churchill

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. – Winston Churchill

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. – Winston S. Churchill

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy then an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. – Winston Churchill

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is 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. – Winston Churchill

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else. – Winston Churchill

You cannot cure cancer by a majority. – Winston Churchill

You create your own universe as you go along. – Winston S. Churchill

You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. – Winston Churchill

You have enemies? Good. It means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. – Winston Churchill

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. – Winston Churchill

You make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. – Winston Churchill

You must look at facts because they look at you. – Winston Churchill

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. – Winston Churchill

You will make all kinds of mistakes but as long as you are generous and true and fierce you cannot hurt the world, or even seriously distress her. – Winston Churchill

You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth. – Winston S. Churchill

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks. – Winston Churchill

 

Early career years (1898–1929)

• Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.
  • The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter I
  • Description of the tribal areas of what is now Pakistan, commonly referred to as Waziristan
  • Downloadable eText version(s) of this book can be found online at Project Gutenberg

• It is, thank heaven, difficult if not impossible for the modern European to fully appreciate the force which fanaticism exercises among an ignorant, warlike and Oriental population. Several generations have elapsed since the nations of the West have drawn the sword in religious controversy, and the evil memories of the gloomy past have soon faded in the strong, clear light of Rationalism and human sympathy. Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination. But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.
  • The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter III.

• I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
  • The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter III.

• It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.
  • The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter VIII.

• Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
  • The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter X.

• How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
  Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
  • The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899), Volume II pp. 248–250
  • (This passage does not appear in the 1902 one-volume abridgment, the version posted by Project Gutenberg.)
  • Downloadable etext version(s) of this book can be found online at Project Gutenberg

• It is the habit of the boa constrictor to besmear the body of his victim with a foul slime before he devours it; and there are many people in England, and perhaps elsewhere, who seem to be unable to contemplate military operations for clear political objects, unless they can cajole themselves into the belief that their enemy are utterly and hopelessly vile. To this end the Dervishes, from the Mahdi and the Khalifa downwards, have been loaded with every variety of abuse and charged with all conceivable crimes. This may be very comforting to philanthropic persons at home; but when an army in the field becomes imbued with the idea that the enemy are vermin who cumber the earth, instances of barbarity may easily be the outcome. This unmeasured condemnation is moreover as unjust as it is dangerous and unnecessary.
  • The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899), Volume II pp. 394–395
  • (This passage does not appear in the 1902 one-volume abridgment, the version posted by Project Gutenberg).

• What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man … the Kaffir is to be declared the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be armed with political rights.
  • On the Boer War, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900).

• There must be room in our army system for nearly everyone who is not grossly idle or grossly stupid. It is not a case of employing incompetent or worthless men, and such should, of course, be expelled from the army. It is a case of finding suitable employment for officers not fit for higher command.
  • Officers and Gentlemen, The Saturday Evening Post, 29 December 1900.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 51. ISBN 0903988429

• It may be said, therefore, that the military opinion of the world is opposed to those people who cry ‘Democratize the army!’ and it must be remembered that an army is not a field upon which persons with Utopian ideas may exercise their political theories, but a weapon for the defence of the State.
  • British Cavalry, The Anglo-Saxon Review, March 1901.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 60. ISBN 0903988429

• I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
  • Speech and interview at the University of Michigan, 1902.

• In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
  • House of Commons, 13 May 1901, Hansard vol. 93 col. 1572.

• The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year – and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
  • Newspaper interview (1902), when asked what qualities a politician required, Halle, Kay, Irrepressible Churchill. Cleveland: World, 1966. cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 489 ISBN 1586486381

• Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away — you may put money in the pockets of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way. Every vote given for Protection is a vote to give Governments the right of robbing Peter to pay Paul and charging the public a handsome commission on the job.
  • “Why I am a Free Trader,” Chapter I in T.W. Stead’s journal Coming Men on Coming Questions (April 13, 1905), bottom p. 9.

• The doc­trines that by keep­ing out for­eign goods more wealth, and con­se­quently more employ­ment, will be cre­ated at home, are either true or they are not true. We con­tend that they are not true. We con­tend that for a nation to try to tax itself into pros­per­ity is like a man stand­ing in a bucket and try­ing to lift him­self up by the han­dle.^[1]:9
  • From “Why I am a Free Trader” (1905), Churchill revised this several times, the earliest recorded version coming from the speech “For Free Trade” at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 19 Feb­ru­ary 1904:
    • It is the the­ory of the Pro­tec­tion­ist that imports are an evil. He thinks that if you shut out the for­eign imported man­u­fac­tured goods you will make these goods your­selves, in addi­tion to the goods which you make now, includ­ing those goods which we make to exchange for the for­eign goods that come in. If a man can believe that he can believe any­thing. (Laugh­ter.) We Free-traders say it is not true. To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man think­ing that he can stand in a bucket and lift him­self up by the han­dle. (Laugh­ter and cheers.) ^{[2]:Vol.I: 261}

• Politics are almost as exciting as war, and – quite as dangerous … [I]n war, you can only be killed once. But in politics many times.
  • From a conversational exchange with Harold Begbie, as cited in Master Workers, Begbie, Methuen & Co. (1906), p. 177.

• For my own part I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities which he excites among his opponents. I have always set myself not merely to relish but to deserve thoroughly their censure.
  • November 17, 1906, Institute of Journalists Dinner, London; in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 392 ISBN 1586486381

• The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance under which Chinese Labour is now being carried on do not, in my opinion, constitute a state of slavery. A labour contract into which men enter voluntarily for a limited and for a brief period, under which they are paid wages which they consider adequate, under which they are not bought or sold and from which they can obtain relief on payment of seventeen pounds ten shillings, the cost of their passage, may not be a healthy or proper contract, but it cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.
  • In the House of Commons, February 22, 1906 “King’s Speech (Motion for an Address)”, as Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office, repeating what he had said during the 1906 election campaign. This is the original context for terminological inexactitude, used simply literally, whereas later the term took on the sense of a euphemism or circumlocution for a lie. As quoted in Sayings of the Century (1984) by Nigel Rees.

• I submit respectfully to the House as a general principle that our responsibility in this matter is directly proportionate to our power. Where there is great power there is great responsibility, where there is less power there is less responsibility, and where there is no power there can, I think, be no responsibility.
  • In the House of Commons, February 28, 1906 speech South African native races

• They knew what to expect when their opponents returned to power a party of great vested interests—corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad, the trickery of tariff juggles, the tyranny of a well-fed party machine; sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism and Imperialism by the Imperial pint, the open hand at the public Exchequer, the open door at the publichouse, dear food for the million, cheap labour for the millionaire. That was the policy which the Tory party offered them, and that was the policy which he asked them to strike at with the battle-axe of Scotland.
  • Speech in Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, Scotland (8 May 1908), quoted in The Times (9 May 1908), p. 14

• The Times is speechless, and takes three columns to express its speechlessness.
  • Speech at Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, Scotland (“The Dundee Election”), May 14, 1908, in Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909), Churchill, BiblioBazaar (Second Edition, 2006), p. 148 ISBN 1426451989

• Uncounted generations will trample heedlessly upon our tombs. What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.
  • Speech at Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, Scotland (“Unemployment”), October 10, 1908, in Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909), Churchill, Echo Library (2007), p. 87 ISBN 1406845817

• The quarrel between a tremendous democratic electorate and a one-sided hereditary chamber of wealthy men has often been threatened, has often been averted, has been long debated, has been long delayed, but it has always been inevitable, and it has come at last. It is now open, it is now flagrant, and it must now be carried to a conclusion.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 20

• Why should five hundred or six hundred titled persons govern us, and why should their children govern our children for ever? I invite a reply from the apologists and the admirers of the House of Lords. I invite them to show any ground of reason, or of logic, or of expediency or practical common sense in defence of the institution which has taken the predominant part during the last few days in the politics of our country. There is no defence, and there is no answer, except that the House of Lords…has survived out of the past. It is a lingering relic of a feudal order. It is the remains, the solitary reminder of a state of things and of a balance of forces which has wholly passed away. I challenge the defenders, the backers, and the instigators of the House of Lords—I challenge them to justify and defend before the electors of the country the character and composition of the hereditary assembly.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 23

• There is no difficulty in vindicating the principle of a hereditary monarchy. The experience of every country and of all ages, the practical reasonings of common sense, arguments of the highest theory, arguments of most commonplace convenience, all unite to show the wisdom which places the supreme leadership of the State beyond the reach of private ambition and above the shocks and changes of party strife.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 24

• The House of Lords, in rejecting the Budget which provides for the national expenditure of the year, are refusing, for the first time since the great Rebellion, aids and supplies to the Crown, and by that fact and by their intrusion upon finance they commit an act of violence against the British Constitution. There is no precedent of any kind for the rejection of a Budget Bill by the House of Lords in all the long annals of the British Parliament, or, before that, in the still more venerable annals of the English Parliament. The custom of centuries forbids their intrusion upon finance.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 25

• The House of Lords have only been tolerated all these years because they were thought to be in a comatose condition which preceded dissolution. They have got to dissolution now. That this body, utterly unrepresentative, utterly unreformed, should come forward and claim the right to make and unmake Governments, should lay one greedy paw on the prerogatives of the sovereign and another upon the established and most fundamental privileges of the House of Commons is a spectacle which a year ago no one would have believed could happen; which fifty years ago no Peer would have dared suggest; and which two hundred years ago would not have been discussed in the amiable though active manner of a political campaign, but would have been settled by charges of cavalry and the steady advance of iron-clad pikemen.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 46

• “All civilization”, said Lord Curzon, quoting Renan, “all civilization has been the work of aristocracies”. … It would be much more true to say “The upkeep of aristocracies has been the hard work of all civilizations”.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 53-54

• I cannot believe that in the twentieth century the British people are by their deliberate vote going to constitute this assembly – a fraction of whom no doubt are men of real eminence and dignity, but the great majority of whom are quite ordinary people of the well-to-do class with all the narrowest prejudices and special interests of that class – I cannot believe that you by your votes are going to constitute them the main foundation on which the governing power in our land is reposed. I cannot believe the middle classes and the working classes, who after all have only to use their voting strength to get their own way, are going to degrade and cast away their own voting powers which their fathers won for them in the past…I cannot believe that the electors are going obsequiously to hand over their most vital constitutional right, namely, to choose the Chamber that governs the Government, to an antiquated body of titled persons utterly beyond their control.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 65-66

• There is nothing economically unsound in increasing temporarily and artificially the demand for labour during a period of temporary and artificial contraction. There is a plain need of some averaging machinery to regulate and even-up the general course of the labour market. … by every step in that direction you would free thousands of your fellow-countrymen from undeserved agony and ruin.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 133-134

• We have entered upon a period of crisis and conflict more grave and crucial than any living man has known, and it is a conflict which I think has been more deliberately undertaken and will be more resolutely fought through by both sides than any political conflict that we can recall. Terribly important as economic and constitutional questions may be, the fiscal system of a country and the system of Government which prevails in a country are only means to an end, and that end must be to create conditions favourable to the social and moral welfare of the masses of the citizens.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 137

• We have left the wilderness of phrases and formulas, the cut and dried party issues, and we have broken violently into a world of constructive action. It would be an exaggeration to speak of these changes as though they were a revolution. They are not a revolution, but, taken altogether, the policy which has been unfolded to this country during the last two or three years, and which is gripped together and carried forward by the Budget – that policy which the Lords have for the time being brought to a full stop – constitutes by far the largest, most scientific, most deliberate, most resolute attempt at social organization and social advance which any man living can remember.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 137-138

• The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety. … We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class, with an increasing disorganization, with an increasing destruction of human strength and human virtue—nothing, in fact, but that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of extreme wealth and of extreme want.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 138-139

• The greatest danger to the British Empire and to the British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not in the ‘Yellow Peril’ nor the ‘Black Peril’ nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation of boy labour, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty, the awful jumbles of an obsolete Poor Law, the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury—here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her power.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 139-140

• The Budget, and the policy of the Budget, is the first conscious attempt on the part of the State to build up a better and a more scientific organization of society for the workers of this country.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 146-147

• If large classes of the population live under conditions which make it difficult if not impossible for them to keep a home together in decent comfort, if the children are habitually underfed, if the housewife is habitually overstrained, if the bread-winner is under-employed or under-paid, if all are unprotected and uninsured against the common hazards of modern industrial life, if sickness, accident, infirmity, or old age, or unchecked intemperance, or any other curse or affliction, break up the home, as they break up thousands of homes, and scatter the family, as they scatter thousands of families in our land, it is not merely the waste of earning-power or the dispersal of a few poor sticks of furniture, it is the stamina, the virtue, safety, and honour of the British race that are being squandered.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 147

• Liberalism supplies at once the higher impulse and the practicable path; it appeals to persons by sentiments of generosity and humanity; it proceeds by courses of moderation. By gradual steps, by steady effort from day to day, from year to year, Liberalism enlists hundreds of thousands upon the side of progress and popular democratic reform whom militant Socialism would drive into violent Tory reaction … The cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 152-153

• The whole tendency of civilization is…towards the multiplication of the collective functions of society. The ever growing complications of civilization create for us new services which have to be undertaken by the State, and create for us an expansion of the existing services. I am of the opinion that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour. I am very sorry we have not got the railways of this country in our hands. We may do something better with the canals, and we are all agreed that the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 154

• I look forward to the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit. I do not think that Liberalism in any circumstances can cut itself off from this fertile field of social effort, and I would recommend you not to be scared in discussing any of these proposals, just because some old woman comes along and tells you they are Socialistic.
  • The People’s Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 154

• Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.
  • Speech to the Scottish Liberal Association, Edinburgh, 18 July 1909

• The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, and even of convicted criminals against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man—these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (20 July 1910)

• The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year has passed.
  • (Home Secretary) Churchill to Prime Minister Asquith on compulsory sterilization of ‘the feeble-minded and insane’; cited, as follows (excerpted from longer note) : It is worth noting that eugenics was not a fringe movement of obscure scientists but often led and supported, in Britain and America, by some of the most prominent public figures of the day, across the political divide, such as Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes and Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, none other than Winston Churchill, whilst Home Secretary in 1910, made the following observation: [text of quote] (quoted in Jones, 1994: 9)., in ‘Race’, sport, and British society (2001), Carrington & McDonald, Routledge, Introduction, Note 4, p. 20 ISBN 0415246296

• ‘I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race.’
  • As Home Secretary in a 1910 Departmental Paper. The original document is in the collection of Asquith’s papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Also quoted in Clive Ponting, “Churchill” (Sinclair Stevenson 1994).

• The British Navy is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury. Our naval power involves British existence. It is existence to us; it is expansion to them. We cannot menace the peace of a single Continental hamlet, nor do we wish to do so no matter how great and supreme our Navy may become. But, on the other hand, the whole fortunes of our race and Empire, the whole treasure accumulated during so many centuries of sacrifice and achievement would perish and be swept utterly away if our naval supremacy were to be impaired. It is the British Navy which makes Great Britain a great Power.
  • Speech in Glasgow (9 February 1912), quoted in The Times (10 February 1912), p. 9

• Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be made like this?
  • In a letter to his wife Clemmie, during the build up to World War I.

• Like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.
  • On playing golf : as cited in The quote verifier: who said what, where, and when (2006), Keyes, Macmillan, p. 27 ISBN 0312340044

• Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves, and to save all those who rely upon you. You have only to go right on, and at the end of the road, be it short or long, victory and honor will be found.
  • Remarks at the Guildhall, 4 September 1914, after the first British naval victory of World War I, the sinking of three German cruisers in the Battle of Heligoland Bight, as cited in Churchill: A Life, Martin Gilbert, Macmillan (1992), p. 279 : ISBN 0805023968

• I am finished.
  • On losing his position at the Admiralty in 1915. Said to Lord Riddell, as cited in Maxims and Reflections, Chapter I (On Himself), Churchill, Houghton Mifflin Company (1947).

• [The] truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, May 17, 1916 “Royal Assent”.

• Only the final results can prove whether military autocracies or Parliamentary Governments are more likely — take them for all in all — to preserve the welfare and safety of great nations. If the result is inconclusive, the conflict will be renewed after an uneasy interval. But when an absolute decision is obtained the system of the victors — whoever they are — will probably be adopted to a very great extent by the vanquished.
  • On the Great War, The Sinister Hypothesis, The Sunday Pictorial, 9 July 1916.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 91. ISBN 0903988429

• The true characteristic of all British strategy lies in the use of amphibious power. Not the sea alone, but the land and the sea together: not the Fleet alone, but the Army in the hand of the Fleet.
  • The Great Amphibian, The Sunday Pictorial, 23 July 1916.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 101. ISBN 0903988429

• The German hope is that if the frontiers can be unshakeably maintained for another year, a peace can be obtained which will relieve Germany from the consequences of the hideous catastrophe in which she has plunged the world, and leave her free to scheme and prepare a decisive stroke in another generation. Unless Germany is beaten in a manner which leaves no room for doubt or dispute, unless she is convinced by the terrible logic of events that the glory of her people can never be achieved by violent means, unless her war-making capacity after the war is sensibly diminished, a renewal of the conflict, after an uneasy and malevolent truce, seems unavoidable.
  • The War by Land and Sea, Part IV, The London Magazine, January 1917.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 147-8. ISBN 0903988429

• I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.
  • A letter to a friend (1916).

• No compromise on the main purpose; no peace till victory; no pact with unrepentant wrong — that is the Declaration of July 4th, 1918.
  • At a joint Anglo-American rally in Westminster, July 4, 1918, speaking against calls for a negotiated truce with Germany. As printed in War aims & peace ideals: selections in prose & verse (1919), edited by Tucker Brooke & Henry Seidel Canby, Yale University Press, p. 138.

• The Great War through which we have passed differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. … Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.
  • The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter I (The Vials of Wrath), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 10-11.
• We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs….The king’s ships were at sea.
  • The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter IX (The Crisis), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 212-213.
• There is always a strong case for doing nothing, especially for doing nothing yourself.
  • The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter XV (Antwerp), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), p. 340.
• Eaten bread is soon forgotten. Dangers which are warded off by effective precautions and foresight are never even remembered.
  • The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter XVII (The Grand Fleet and the Submarine Alarm), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), p. 399.
• Mechanical not less than strategic conditions had combined to produce at this early period in the war a deadlock both on sea and land. The strongest fleet was paralysed in its offensive by the menace of the mine and the torpedo. The strongest army was arrested in its advance by the machine gun……The mechanical danger must be overcome by a mechanical remedy…..Something must be discovered which would render ships immune from the torpedo, and make it unnecessary for soldiers to bare their breasts to the machine-gun hail.
  • The World Crisis, 1915 : Chapter I (The Deadlock in the West), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 22-23.
• Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.
  • The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part I : Chapter V (Jutland: The Preliminaries), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), pp. 112.
• Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe.
  • The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part II : Chapter XXIII (Victory), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), p. 544.
• Great Britain could have no other object but to use her whole influence and resources consistently over a long period of years to weave France and Germany so closely together economically, socially and morally, as to prevent the occasion of quarrels and make their causes die in a realization of mutual prosperity and interdependence.
  • The World Crisis, The Aftermath : Chapter XX (The End of the World Crisis), Churchill, Butterworth (1929), p. 457.

• One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks.
  • Paris, 24 January 1919. Churchill: A Life. Gilbert, Martin (1992). New York: Holt, p. 408. ISBN 9780805023961

• The aid which we can give to those Russian armies which are now engaged in fighting against the foul baboonery of Bolshevism can be given by arms, munitions, equipment, and by the technical services. It is a malicious statement against the interests of the British Empire to suggest that it is necessary for us to prolong the action of the Military Service Act because of enterprises which we have on foot in Russia.
  • Mansion House speech (19 February 1919)^[3][4]

• I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases: gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected … We cannot, in any circumstances acquiesce to the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier.
  • Statement as president of the Air Council, War Office Departmental Minute (1919-05-12); Churchill Papers 16/16, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

  Many argue that quotes from this passage are often taken out of context, because Churchill is distinguishing between non-lethal agents and the deadly gasses used in World War I and emphasizing the use of non-lethal weapons; however Churchill is not clearly ruling out the use of lethal gases, simply stating that “it is not necessary to use only the most deadly”. It is sometimes claimed that gas killed many young and elderly Kurds and Arabs when the RAF bombed rebelling villages in Iraq in 1920 during the British occupation. For more information on this matter, see Gas in Mesopotamia.

• Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
  • On Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in the House of Commons, November 5, 1919 as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 355 ISBN 1586486381

• First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, ‘I am an English man practising the Jewish faith.’ This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the ‘National Jews’ in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek — all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.
  • “Zionism versus Bolshevism”, Illustrated Sunday Herald (February 1920)

  (A note: Churchill viewed Bolshevism as a heavily Jewish phenomenon. He contrasted the Jewish role in the creation of Bolshevism with a more positive view of the role that Jews had played in England.[1]).

• In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
  • Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill ‘Bolshevism versus Zionism; a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ in Illustrated Daily Herald, 8 February 1920.

• However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer during the Amritsar riots, upon the anxious and critical situation in the Punjab, upon the danger to Europeans throughout that province, … one tremendous fact stands out – I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three to four times as many, at the Jallian Wallah Bagh on 13th April. That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. … It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 “Amritsar” ; at the time, Churchill was serving as Secretary of State for War under Prime Minister David Lloyd George

• Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 “Amritsar” ; at the time, Churchill was serving as Secretary of State for War under Prime Minister David Lloyd George

• Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British Pharmacopaeia.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 “Amritsar” ; at the time, Churchill was serving as Secretary of State for War under Prime Minister David Lloyd George

• I yield to no one in my detestation of Bolshevism, and of the revolutionary violence which precedes it. … But my hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained. … Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism in their desperate efforts to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire … does not need such aid. Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 “Amritsar”

• Let me marshal the facts. The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything. It was holding a seditious meeting. When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed to the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for 8 or 10 minutes … [i]f the road had not been so narrow, the machine guns and the armoured cars would have joined in. Finally, when the ammunition had reached the point that only enough remained to allow for the safe return of the troops, and after 379 persons … had been killed, and when most certainly 1,200 or more had been wounded, the troops, at whom not even a stone had been thrown, swung round and marched away. … We have to make it absolutely clear … that this is not the British way of doing business. … Our reign, in India or anywhere else, has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 “Amritsar”

• I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
  • In “Painting as a Pastime”, first published in the Strand Magazine in two parts (December 1921/January 1922), cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 456 ISBN 1586486381

• He ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.
  • Referring to Mahatma Gandhi in conversation with Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 1921.^[5][6]

• Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and the glory of the climb.
  • In “Painting as a Pastime”, the Strand Magazine (December 1921/January 1922), cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 568 ISBN 1586486381

• Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.
  • Remark in 1923 after rejoining the Conservatives, having left them earlier to join the Liberals; reported in Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill (1966), p. 52–53. Other sources say this remark was made in 1924.

• The enthronement in office of a Socialist Government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great States only on the morrow of defeat in war. It will delay the return of prosperity; it will check enterprise and impair credit; it will open a period of increasing political confusion and disturbance.
  • Letter to a correspondent (17 January 1924) shortly before Labour formed its first government, reprinted in The Times (18 January 1924), p. 14

• Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?.
  • Pall Mall Gazette (1924) on HG Wells’ suggestion of an atomic bomb, in “BBC Article”

• By abandoning the naval base at Singapore the Socialist Government has made it impossible for the British Navy to enter the Pacific, and consequently to afford the slightest assistance to Australia and New Zealand, no matter how terrible their need might be. Yet almost at the same time that the British Navy is stripped of its old power of defending the British Empire we know well that they would gladly hawk it round Europe to be the drudge of an international organization and fight in every quarrel but its own.
  • Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14

• Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. (Cheers.) It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds. It is for this process that Mr. MacDonald asks us to make ourselves responsible. We are to render these tyrannies possible by lending to their authors money to pay for the ammunition to murder the Georgians, to enable the Soviet sect to keep its stranglehold on the dumb Russian nation, and to poison the world, and so far as they can, the British Empire, with their filthy propaganda. (Cheers.) That is what we are asked to take upon ourselves. It is an outrage on the British name.
  • Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14

• But contrast the attitude of the Socialist Government towards their Bolshevist friends and their attitude to the great self-governing Dominions of the Crown. To the enemies of Britain, of civilization, of freedom, to those who deserted us in the crises of the war—smiles, compliments, caresses, cash. But for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who sent their brave men to fight and die by scores of thousands, who never flinched and never wearied, who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh—to them nothing but frigid repulsion. Our bread for the Bolshevist serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. (Cheers.) That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain.
  • Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14

• I am most anxious that in dealing with matters which every Member knows are extremely delicate matters, I should not use any phrase or expression which would cause offence to our friends and Allies on the Continent or across the Atlantic Ocean.
  • Speaking on inter-Allied debts in the House of Commons (December 10, 1924); reported in Parliamentary Debates (Commons) (1925), 5th series, vol. 179, col. 259.

• Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
  • Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches (1974), Chelsea House, Volume IV: 1922–1928, p. 3462 ISBN 0835206939

• I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 7, 1926 “Emergency Services”, responding to criticism that he edited the British Gazette in a biased manner during the General Strike, as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), ed. Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 152 ISBN 0300107986

• Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you — another “British Gazette.”
  • Speech in the House of Commons, July 7, 1926 “Emergency Services” ; at this time, Churchill was serving as Chancellor of the Excheqer under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
  • Threatening the Labour Party and trade union movement with a return of the Government-published newspaper he edited during that May’s General Strike.

• A sheep in sheep’s clothing.
  • On Ramsay MacDonald. This is often taken as referring to Clement Attlee, but Scottish historian D. W. Brogan is cited in Safire’s Political Dictionary (2008), William Safire, Oxford University Press US, p. 352 ISBN 0195343344 as follows: ‘Sir Winston Churchill never said of Clement Attlee that he was a sheep in sheep’s clothing. I have this on the excellent authority of Sir Winston himself. The phrase was totally inapplicable to Mr. Attlee. It was applicable, and applied, to J. Ramsay MacDonald, a very different kind of Labour leader.’

• To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
  • Winston Churchill (June 23, 1925), His complete speeches, 1897–1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James, Chelsea House ed., vol. 4 (1922–1928), p. 3706. During a debate with Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden.
  • Often misquoted as: To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often.

• What a man! I have lost my heart! … If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism. … Your movement has rendered a service to the whole world. The greatest fear that ever tormented every Democratic or Socialist leader was that of being outbid or surpassed by some other leader more extreme than himself. It has been said that a continual movement to the Left, a kind of fatal landslide toward the abyss, has been the character of all revolutions. Italy has shown that there is a way to combat subversive forces.
  • On Benito Mussolini and Italian Fascism, in a press statement from Rome (20 January 1927), quoted in Churchill by Himself : The Definitive Collection of Quotations (2011) by Richard Langworth, p. 169

• Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of stabilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.
  • Press statement from Rome (20 January 1927), as quoted in Introduction: A Political-Biographical Sketch by Tariq Ali in Class War Conservatism and Other Essays (2015) by Ralph Miliband, with date of quote given in Go Betweens for Hitler by Karina Urbach.

• An infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia; a Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slew the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroyed the health and even the souls of nations.
  • The Aftermath, by Winston Churchill (published 1929), p. 274

• The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives, and though each had ardent advocates, most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre — horrid and inexorcisable.
  • The World Crisis, Volume V : the Aftermath (1929), Churchill, Butterworth (London).

• Although trade is important, there are other and stronger bonds of Empire, and since the Conference of 1926 nothing but common interests and traditions have held the Empire together. But those are mighty ties, incomprehensible to Europeans, which have drawn millions of men from the far corners of the earth to the battlefields of France, and we must trust to them to continue to draw us together.
  • Speech in Toronto (16 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 51

• Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production.
  • Quoted in Randolph Churchill’s diary entry (24 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 55

• The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny, and internecine war and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history.
  • Article for the Daily Mail (16 November 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 356

• Dominion status can certainly not be attained by a community which brands and treats sixty millions of its members, fellow human beings, toiling at their side, as ‘Untouchables’, whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is pollution. Dominion status can certainly not be attained while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of mediaeval wars. It cannot be attained while the political classes in India represent only an insignificant fraction of the three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.
  • Article for the Daily Mail (16 November 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 356–357

My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)

• She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly — but at a distance.
  • On his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, Chapter 1 (Childhood).

• Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.
  • Chapter 1 (Childhood).

• Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.
  • On studying English rather than Latin at school, Chapter 2 (Harrow).

• No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.
  • My early life, 1874–1904 (1930), Churchill, Winston S., p. 45 (1996 Touchstone Edition), ISBN 0684823454

• Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.
  • Chapter 2 (Harrow).

• Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.
  • Chapter 2 (Harrow).

• I then had one of the three or four long intimate conversations with him which are all I can boast.
  • On his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Chapter 3 (Examinations).

• In retrospect these years form not only the least agreeable, but the only barren and unhappy period of my life. I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony. This train of thought must not lead me to exaggerate the character of my school days … Harrow was a very good school … Most of the boys were very happy … I can only record the fact that, no doubt through my own shortcomings, I was an exception. … I was on the whole considerably discouraged … All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world. They were far better both at the games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.
  • Chapter 3 (Examinations).

• Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning wages however small to help to keep up the home. He would like to have some leisure of his own to use or misuse as he pleased. He would ask little more than the right to work or starve. And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who are worthy — and why try to stuff in those who are not? — and knowledge and thought would open the ‘magic casements’ of the mind.
  • Chapter 3 (Examinations).

• I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!
  • Chapter 3 (Examinations), p. 27.

• Although always prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it should be postponed.
  • Chapter 4 (Sandhurst), p. 72.

• Come on now all you young men, all over the world. You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the war. You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in Life’s fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are. ‘The earth is yours and the fulness thereof.’ Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities. Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown. Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.
  • End of Chapter 4 (Sandhurst).
  • The Netflix movie series “The Crown” (2016) attributes the following, modified citation to this source: “Hear this, young men and women everywhere, and proclaim it far and wide. The earth is yours and the fullness thereof. Be kind but be fierce. You’re needed now more than ever before. Take up the mantle of change for this is your time.”

• I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.
  • Chapter 5 (The Fourth Hussars).

• I have no doubt that the Romans planned the time-table of their days far better than we do. They rose before the sun at all seasons. Except in wartime we never see the dawn. Sometimes we see sunset. The message of sunset is sadness; the message of dawn is hope. The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even play, from eight o’clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.
  • Chapter 6 (Cuba).

• I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.
  • Chapter 7 (Hounslow).

• I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.
  • Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

• I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.
  • Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

• It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
  • Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

• I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk — and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.
  • Chapter 10 (The Malakand Field Force).

• When we all got back to camp, our General communicated by heliograph through a distant mountain top with Sir Bindon Blood at Nawagai. Sir Bindon and our leading brigade had thenselves been heavily attacked the night before. They had lost hundreds of animals and twenty or thirty men, but otherwise were none the worse. Sir Bindon sent orders that we were to stay in the Mamund valley and lay it waste with fire and sword in vengeance. This accordingly we did, but with great precautions. We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. So long as the villages were in the plain, this was quite easy. The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullen watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. When however we had to attack the villas on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.
• Chapter 11 (The Mamund Valley). [2]

• Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.
  • Chapter 18 (With Buller To The Cape), p. 246
  • Quoted in This Time It’s Our War (2003) by Leonard Fein in The Forward (July 25, 2003).

The 1930s

• We are bound to further every honest and practical step which the nations of Europe may make to reduce the barriers which divide them and to nourish their common interests and common welfare. We rejoice at every diminution of the internal tariffs and martial armaments of Europe. We see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonalty. But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old, ‘Wouldest thou be spoken for to the king, or captain of the host?’, we should reply, with the Shunammite woman: ‘I dwell among mine own people.’
  • “The United States of Europe”, The Saturday Evening Post (15 February 1930)
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol II, Churchill and Politics, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 184. ISBN 0903988437

• …the inexorable duty which has come upon you to use your political power to help our Island out of the rotten state which it has now fallen. When I think of the way in which we poured out blood and money to take Contalmaison or to hold Ypres, I cannot understand why it is we should now throw away our conquests and our inheritance with both hands, through sheer helplessness and pusillanimity. In this disastrous year we have written ourselves down as a second Naval Power, squandered our authority in Egypt, and brought India to a position when the miserable public take it as an open question whether we should not clear out of the country altogether. Currently with all this, we have so reduced our reputation abroad and among our own dominions, that as you said the other night, ‘they all think we are down and out’. My interest in politics is to see this position retrieved.
  • Letter to Lord Beaverbook (23 September 1930), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 185

• The truth is that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with, and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat’s-meat. The sooner this is realised, the less trouble and misfortune will there be for all concerned.
  • Speech in Cannon Street Hotel, London (12 December 1930) at the first public meeting of the Indian Empire Society, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 377

• For 30 years I have watched from a central position the manifestations of the will power of Great Britain, and I do not believe the people will consent to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India. No nation of which I am aware, great or small, has ever voluntarily or tamely suffered such an overwhelming injury to its interests or such a harsh abrogation of its rights. After all, there are British rights and interests in India. Two centuries of effort and achievement, lives given on a hundred fields, far more lives given and consumed in faithful and devoted service to the Indian people themselves. All this has earned us rights of our own in India.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (26 January 1931)

• I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities. But the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as “The Boneless Wonder.” My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.
  • A jibe at Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) Ramsay MacDonald during a speech in the House of Commons, January 28, 1931 “Trade Disputes and Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill”.

• It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representatives of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India and the danger to which white people there are exposed. It can only encourage all the forces which are hostile to British authority.
  • Speech to the Council of the West Essex Conservative Association (23 February 1931) on Gandhi’s meeting with the Viceroy of India, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 390

• India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.
  • Speech at Royal Albert Hall, London (18 March 1931).

• In the twinkling of an eye I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.
  • “Election Memories”, The Strand Magazine (September 1931).
  • Reproduced in Thoughts and Adventures, 1932.
• We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
  • “Fifty Years Hence”, The Strand Magazine (December 1931).

• …live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.
  • My New York Misadventure, The Daily Mail, 4 and 5 January 1932
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 94. ISBN 0903988453
• We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.
  • Lecture at Cleveland, Ohio (February 3, 1932), reported in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 5, p. 5130; referring to the theory that over-production caused the Depression.

• That abject, squalid, shameless avowal…It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom…My mind turns across the narrow waters of Channel and the North Sea, where great nations stand determined to defend their national glories or national existence with their lives. I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland. I think of Italy, with her ardent Fascisti, her renowned Chief, and stern sense of national duty. I think of France, anxious, peace-loving, pacifist to the core, but armed to the teeth and determined to survive as a great nation in the world. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these people when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.
  • Speech to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union (17 February 1933) after the Oxford Union passed the motion “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 456

• [Fascism] is not a sign-post which would direct us here, for I firmly believe that our long experienced democracy will be able to preserve a parliamentary system of government with whatever modifications may be necessary from both extremes of arbitrary rule.
  • Speech to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union (17 February 1933), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 457

• I am strongly of opinion that we require to strengthen our armaments by air and upon the seas in order to make sure that we are still judges of our own fortunes, our own destinies and our own action. … Not to have an adequate air force in the present state of the world is to compromise the foundations of national freedom and independence.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (14 March 1933)

• “Thank God for the French army.” When we read about Germany, when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race—when we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon themselves. It seems to me that, at a moment like this, to ask France to halve her army while Germany doubles hers…to ask France to halve her air force while the German air force remains whatever it is…such a proposal, it seems to me, is likely to be considered by the French Government at present, at any rate, as somewhat unseasonable.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (23 March 1933) shortly after Hitler became Chancellor

• We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.
  • A jibe directed at Ramsay MacDonald, during a speech in the House of Commons, March 23, 1933 “European Situation”. This quote is similar to a remark (“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met”) made by Abraham Lincoln. [Frederick Trevor Hill credits Lincoln with this remark in Lincoln the Lawyer (1906), adding that ‘History has considerately sheltered the identity of the victim’.]

• New discord has arisen in Europe of late years from the fact that Germany is not satisfied with the result of the late War. I have indicated several times that Germany got off lightly after the Great War. I know that that is not always a fashionable opinion, but the facts repudiate the idea that a Carthaginian peace was in fact imposed upon Germany. No division was made of the great masses of the German people. No portion of Germany inhabited by Germans was detached, except where there was the difficulty of disentangling the population of the Silesian border. No attempt was made to divide Germany as between the northern and southern portions which might well have tempted the conquerors at that time. No State was carved out of Germany. She underwent no serious territorial loss, except the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which she herself had seized only 50 years before. The great mass of the Germans remained united after all that Europe had passed through, and they are more vehemently united to-day than ever before. You may talk of the War indemnity; what has happened there? I suppose that the Germans paid, in round terms, £1,000,000,000. But they had borrowed £2,000,000,000 at the same time, and there are no signs of their paying back.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (13 April 1933)

• On the other hand, when we think of what would have happened to us, to France or to Belgium if the Germans had won; when we think of the terms which they exacted from Rumania, or of the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; when we remember that up to a few months of the end of the War German authorities refused to consider that Belgium could ever be liberated, but said that she should be kept in thrall for military purposes for ever, I do not think that we need break our hearts in deploring the treatment that Germany is receiving now. Germany is not satisfied; but…no concession which has been made has produced any very marked appearance of gratitude. Once it has been conceded it has seemed less valuable than when it was demanded.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (13 April 1933)

• Nothing can save England, if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then, indeed, our story is told. If, while on all sides foreign nations are every day asserting a more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade – if we remain paralysed by our own theoretical doctrines or plunged in the stupor of after-war exhaustion…indeed, all that the croakers predict will come true and our ruin will be certain and final.
  • Speech to the Royal Society of St George (23 April 1933), Winston Churchill, Never Give In!: Winston Churchill’s Speeches (A&C Black, 2013), p. 402

• We must not despair, we must not for a moment pretend that we cannot face these things. Dangers come upon the world; other nations face them. When, in old days, the sea gave access to this island, it was a danger to this island, it made it the most invadable place at any point, but by taking proper measures our ancestors gained the command of the sea, and, consequently, what had been a means of inroad upon us became our sure shield and protection; and there is not the slightest reason why, with our ability and our resources, and our peaceful intentions, our desire only to live quietly here in our island, we should not raise up for ourselves a security in the air above us which will make us as free from serious molestation as did our control of blue water through bygone centuries.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (8 March 1934) during the debate on the Government’s White Paper on Defence that announced an increase in the Royal Air Force

• I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany. I think we should be in a position which would be odious to every man who values freedom of action and independence, and also in a position of the utmost peril for our crowded, peaceful population, engaged in their daily toil. I dread that day, but it is not, perhaps, far distant. It is, perhaps, only a year, or perhaps 18 months, distant…There is still time for us to take the necessary measures, but what we want are the measures. We do not want this paragraph in this White Paper, we want the measures. It is no good writing that first paragraph and then producing £130,000. We want the measures to achieve parity.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (8 March 1934)

• Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death.
  • Have You a Hobby?, Answers, 21 April 1934
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 288. ISBN 0903988453

• I marvel at the complacency of Ministers in the face of the frightful experiences through which we have all so newly passed. I look with wonder upon our thoughtless crowds disporting themselves in the summer sunshine, and upon this unfocused, unheeding House of Commons, which seems to have no higher function than to cheer a Minister. But what is happening across the narrow seas? A terrible process is astir. Germany is arming. That mighty race who fought and almost vanquished the whole world is on the march again. The whole nation is inspired with the idea of retrieving and avenging their defeat in the Great War. They have arisen from the pit of disaster in monstrous guise. … And we are still pestering France to disarm, and we are still disarmed ourselves!
  • ‘How I Would Procure Peace’, Daily Mail (9 July 1934), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 825, n. 3

• What is the dominant fact of the situation? Germany is arming…Germany is arming particularly in the air. … it seems of the utmost importance, not only that we should lose no time in putting ourselves in an adequate position of defence but, that we should keep close and friendly relations with other great Powers of a friendly character who have not fallen into the error which has overtaken us of late years, of neglecting the essentials of our own security.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (13 July 1934)

• At the present time we are the sixth air Power in the world. But every State is rapidly expanding its air force. They are all expanding, but much more rapidly than we are doing. It is certain, therefore, that..in 1936…we shall have fallen further behind other countries than we are now in air defence. … If you extend your view over the [Government’s] five-years’ programme I believe it is also true to state that, having regard to the increases which are being made by other countries and which are projected, even if the whole programme is carried out, at the end of the period…we shall be worse off in 1939 relatively—it is relativity that counts in these matters—than we are now. … Yet even for this tiny, timid, tentative, tardy increase of the Air Force, to which the Government have at length made up their mind, they are to be censured by the whole united forces of the Socialist and Liberal parties here and throughout the country.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (30 July 1934) on Labour’s motion of censure against the Government for rearming

• I am afraid that if you look intently at what is moving towards Great Britain, you will see that the only choice open is the old grim choice our forbears had to face, namely, whether we shall submit or whether we shall prepare. Whether we shall submit to the will of a stronger nation or whether we shall prepare to defend our rights, our liberties and indeed our lives.
  • BBC broadcast (16 November 1934) on German rearmament, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 566

• If England had not resisted German militarism, in my view the German hegemony of Europe would have been established and our island would have had to face a united Continental army. It is the same old story from the days of Marlborough and Napoleon.
  • Letter to G. M. Trevelyan (3 January 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 623

• But what is this India Home Rule Bill? I will tell you. It is a gigantic quilt of jumbled crotchet work. There is no theme; there is no pattern; there is no agreement; there is no conviction; there is no simplicity; there is no courage. It is a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies.
  • BBC broadcast (29 January 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 595

• The storm clouds are gathering over the European scene. Our defences have been neglected. Danger is in the air…yes, I say in the air. The mighty discontented nations are reaching out with the strong hands to regain what they have lost; nay, to gain a predominance which they have never had. Is this, then, the time to plunge our vast dependency of India into the melting-pot?
  • BBC broadcast (29 January 1935) against the Indian Home Rule Bill, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 596

• War arises from both sides feeling they have a hope of victory.
  • The King’s Twenty-Five Years. III. The Coronation and the Agadir Crisis. The Evening Standard, 4 May 1935
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol III, Churchill and People, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 351-2. ISBN 0903988445
• If [Hitler’s] proposal means that we should come to an understanding with Germany to dominate Europe I think this would be contrary to the whole of our history. You know the old fable of the jackal who went hunting with the tiger and what happened after the hunt was over. Thus Elizabeth resisted Philip II of Spain. Thus William III and Marlborough resisted Louis XIV. Thus Pitt resisted Napoleon, and thus we all resisted William II of Germany. Only by taking this path and effort have we preserved ourselves and our liberties, and reached our present position. I see no reason myself to change from this traditional view.
  • Letter to Lord Rothermere (12 May 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 648−649

• In the name of liberty you have done what liberty disowns. In the name of theoretical progress, you have opened the door to practical retrogression. In the name of appeasement and the popular will, you have prescribed a course of endless irritation. … He has won his victory; he has won the victory for which he has fought hard, and long, and adroitly; but it is not a victory, in our opinion, for the interests of this country, nor a victory for the welfare of the peoples of India, and in the crashing cheers which no doubt will hail his majority to-night, we pray there may not mingle the knell of the British Empire in the East.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 June 1935) addressing the Secretary of State for India Samuel Hoare

• Everyone can see the arguments against the English-speaking peoples becoming the policemen of the world.
  • To End War, Collier’s, 29 June 1935
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 351-2. ISBN 0903988429

• [In air power] so far from being half as strong again as Germany, so far from making up lee-way, we are already greatly inferior in numbers and falling further and further behind every month. … No doubt it is not popular to say these things, but I am accustomed to abuse and I expect to have a great deal more of it before I have finished. Somebody has to state the truth. There ought to be a few members of the House of Commons who are in a sufficiently independent position to confront both Ministers and electors with unpalatable truths. We do not wish our ancient freedom and the decent tolerant civilisation we have preserved in this island to hang upon a rotten thread.
  • Speech to the City Carlton Club (26 September 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 1268

• Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the untouchables … Well, you have the opportunity now. I do not like the [Indian Home Rule] Bill but it is now on the Statute Book. I am not going to bother any more, but do not give us a chance to say we anticipated a breakdown…So make it a success. … My test of improvement in the lot of the masses, morally as well as materially. I do not care whether you are more or less loyal to Great Britain … Tell Mr. Gandhi to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success.
  • G.D. Birla’s account of his conversation with Churchill in a letter to Gandhi (September 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 618

• I am genuinely sympathetic towards India. I have got real fears about the future. India, I feel is a burden on us. We have got to maintain an army and for the sake of India we have to maintain Singapore and Near East strength. If India could look after herself we would be delighted. … I would be only too delighted if the Reforms are a success. I have all along felt that there are fifty Indias. But you have got the thing now; make it a success and if you do I will advocate your getting much more.
  • G.D. Birla’s account of his conversation with Churchill in a letter to Gandhi (September 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 619

• The whole of Germany is an armed camp…The industries of Germany are mobilised for war to an extent to which ours were not mobilised even a year after the Great War had begun. The whole population is being trained from childhood up to war. A mighty army is coming into being. Many submarines are already exercising in the Baltics. Great cannon, tanks, machine guns and poison gas are fast accumulating. The Germans are even able to be great exporters of munitions as well as to develop their own enormous magazines. The German air force is developing at a great speed, and in spite of ruthless loss of life. We have no speedy prospect of equalling the German air force or of overtaking Germany in the air, whatever we do in the near future.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (24 October 1935)

• Germany is already well on her way to become, and must become incomparably, the most heavily armed nation in the world and the nation most completely ready for war. There is the dominant factor; there is the factor which dwarfs all others, the factor which we find affecting the movements of politics and diplomacy in every country throughout Europe…we cannot have any anxieties comparable to the anxiety caused by German re-armament. The House will pardon me if I continue to press that anxiety upon it.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (24 October 1935)

• We cannot afford to see Nazidom in its present phase of cruelty and intolerance, with all its hatreds and all its gleaming weapons, paramount in Europe at the present time.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (24 October 1935)

• One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.
  • “Hitler and His Choice”, The Strand Magazine (November 1935).

• We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilisation will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation.
  • “Hitler and His Choice”, The Strand Magazine (November 1935).

• Hitherto, Hitler’s triumphant career has been borne onwards, not only by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.
  • “Hitler and His Choice”, The Strand Magazine (November 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 680

• The twentieth century has witnessed with surprise, not merely the promulgation of these ferocious doctrines, but their enforcement with brutal vigour by the Government and by the populace. No past services, no proved patriotism, even wounds sustained in war, could procure immunity for persons whose only crime was that their parents had brought them into the world. Every kind of persecution, grave or petty, upon the world-famous scientists, writers, and composers at the top down to the wretched little Jewish children in the national schools, was practised, was glorified, and is still being practised and glorified.
  • “Hitler and His Choice”, The Strand Magazine (November 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 681

• A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that freemen prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.
  • You Get It In Black And White, Collier’s, 28 December 1935
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 323. ISBN 0903988453

• There is a great danger that the Parliamentary nations and merciful, tolerant forces in the world will be knocked out quite soon by the heavily armed, unmoral dictatorships. But I believe there is still time to organise a European mass, and perhaps a world mass which would confront them, overawe them, and perhaps let their peoples loose upon them.
  • Letter to Robert Cecil (9 April 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 721

• It seems a mad business to confront these dictators without weapons or military force, and at the same time try to tame and cow the spirit of our people with peace films, anti-recruiting propaganda and resistance to defence measures. Unless the free and law-respecting nations are prepared to organise, arm and combine, they are going to be smashed up. This is going to happen quite soon. But I believe we still have a year to combine and marshal superior forces in defence of the League and its Covenant.
  • Letter to Robert Cecil (9 April 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 722

• I certainly do not take the view that a war between England and Germany is inevitable. I fear very gravely however unless something happens to the Nazi regime in Germany there will be a devastating war in Europe, and it may come earlier than you expect. The only chance of stopping it is to have a union of nations, all well-armed and bound to defend each other, and thus confront the Nazi aggression with over-whelming force.
  • Letter to Lord Londonderry (6 May 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 732

• You are also mistaken in supposing that I have an anti-German obsession. British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt who it is now…It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power.
  • Letter to Lord Londonderry (6 May 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 733

• If I read the future aright Hitler’s government will confront Europe with a series of outrageous events and ever-growing military might. It is events which will show our dangers, though for some the lesson will come too late.
  • Letter to Lord Londonderry (6 May 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 733

• It must be very painful to a man of Lord Hugh Cecil’s natural benevolence and human charity to find so many of God’s children wandering simultaneously so far astray … In these circumstances I would venture to suggest to my noble friend, whose gifts and virtues I have all my life admired, that some further refinement is needed in the catholicity of his condemnations.
  • Letter to The Times on 12 May 1936, responding to Lord Cecil equally denouncing Italy, France, Japan, the USSR, and Germany; Churchill said that the French did not deserve as much criticism as the others. Quoted by John Gunther in Inside Europe (1940), p. 329.

• We have pushed taxation of wealth to a point in Great Britain where in many cases the yield would be greater if the rate were less. The idea that prosperity can be wooed by chasing millionaires is one of the most common and most foolish of modern popular delusions.
  • Soapbox Messiahs, Collier’s, 20 June 1936
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 335. ISBN 0903988453

• Through our own folly and refusal to face realities and deal with evil tendencies while they were yet controllable, we have allowed brutal and intolerant forces to gain almost unchallenged supremacy in Europe and have placed ourselves in a position of weakness and peril, the like of which our history does not record for two and a half centuries.
  • Speech to the New Commonwealth Society (15 July 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 764

• I can well imagine some circles of smart society, some groups of wealthy financiers, and the elements in this country which are attracted by the idea of a Government strong enough to keep the working classes in order; people who hate democracy and freedom, I can well imagine such people accommodating themselves fairly easy to Nazi domination. But the Trade Unionists of Britain, the intellectuals of Socialism and Radicalism, they could no more bear it than the ordinary British Tory. It would be intolerable.
  • Speech in Horsham (23 July 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 768

• I do not like to hear people talking of England, Germany and Italy forming up against European communism.
  • Letter to Charles Corbin (French Ambassador to Britain) (31 July 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 782

• How could we bear, nursed as we have been in a free atmosphere, to be gagged and muzzled; to have spies, eavesdroppers and delators at every corner; to have even private conversations caught up and used against us by the Secret Police and all their agents and creatures; to be arrested and interned without trial; or to be tried by political or Party courts for crimes hitherto unknown to civil law. How could we bear to be treated like schoolboys when we are grown-up men; to be turned out on parade by tens of thousands to march and cheer for this slogan or for that; to see philosophers, teachers and authors bullied and toiled to death in concentration camps; to be forced every hour to conceal the natural workings of the human intellect and the pulsations of the human heart? Why, I say that rather than submit to such oppression, there is no length we would not go to.
  • Speech at Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris (24 September 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 788

• We must recognise that we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries; that there is not one of our simple uncounted rights today for which better men than we are have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield. We have not only a great treasure; we have a great cause. Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?
  • Speech at Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris, 24 September 1936, “Thank God For the French Army”
  • Quoted in Never Give In!: Winston Churchill’s Speeches (2013), p. 111. ISBN 9781472520852

• The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action.
  • At an unveiling of a memorial to T. E. Lawrence at the Oxford High School for Boys (3 October 1936); as quoted in Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence (1989) by Jeremy M Wilson.

• We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people. Thought is free, speech is free, religion is free, no one can say that the Press is not free. In short, we live in a liberal society, the direct product of the great advances in human dignity, stature and well-being which will ever be the glory of the nineteenth century.
  • I Ask You—What Price Freedom? Answers, 24 October 1936.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 360. ISBN 0903988429

• It will not benefit the world if we succeed in banishing the old-fashioned wars of nations only to clear the board for social and doctrinal wars of even greater ferocity and destructiveness. This, indeed, is a growing danger. We were told that the old wars of religion had ended, but that is not much comfort if the wars of various kinds of secular religions or non-God religions are to begin and are to make Europe the arena of their hideous conflict, and if all that makes life worth living to the mass of the people is to be destroyed in the process.
  • I Ask You—What Price Freedom? Answers, 24 October 1936.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 364. ISBN 0903988429

• Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
  • On Stanley Baldwin, as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 322 ISBN 1586486381
  • Also quoted by Kay Halle in Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill’s Wit (1966).

• I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (12 November 1936)

• Anyone can see what the position is. The Government simply cannot make up their mind, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years — precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain — for the locusts to eat.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 “Debate on the Address”, criticizing Stanley Baldwin’s record on rearmament against Hitler.

• The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 “Debate on the Address”
  • Cited in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth
  • This speech is also commonly known by the name “The Locust Years”.

• I am trying to marshal all the forces I can to prevent this coming war, and to strengthen Britain.
  • Letter to Guy Fleetwood Wilson (13 November 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 800

• All the left wing intelligentsia are coming to look to me for protection and I will give it wholeheartedly in return for their aid in the rearmament of Britain.
  • Letter to Randolph Churchill (13 November 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 800

• …they were gathered together on that platform with one object. They wanted to stop this war of which they had heard so much talk. They would like to stop it while time remained, for we had had enough of the last war not to want another. The seriousness and urgency of the danger was exemplified by the divergency of political opinion represented on the platform. We had reached a fateful milestone in human history.
  • Speech at the Albert Hall, London (3 December 1936) at a cross-party meeting organised by the League of Nations Union “in defence of freedom and peace”, quoted in The Times (4 December 1936), p. 18

• …[the] apostles of various kinds of error presented themselves. They were those like Sir Oswald Mosley who were fascinated by the spectacle of brutal power. They would like to use it themselves. They grovelled to Nazi dictatorship in order that they could make people in their turn grovel to them. … At the other end of the political scale were the Trotsky-ite Communists, furious fanatics whose sole aim was to throw the world into one supreme convulsion. Then there was Sir Stafford Cripps, who was in a class by himself. He wished British people to be conquered by the Nazis in order to urge them into becoming Bolsheviks. It seemed a long way round. (Laughter.) And not much enlightenment when they got to the end of their journey. Lastly, there were the absolute non-resisters like Canon Sheppard and Mr. Lansbury. They were pious men, but they would lead the country to ruin, even more surely than all the others.
  • Speech at the Albert Hall, London (3 December 1936) at a cross-party meeting organised by the League of Nations Union “in defence of freedom and peace”, quoted in The Times (4 December 1936), p. 18

• …the war between the Nazis and the Communists; the war of the non-God religions, waged with the weapons of the twentieth century. The most striking fact about the new religions was their similarity. They substituted the devil for God and hatred for love.
  • Speech at the Albert Hall, London (3 December 1936) at a cross-party meeting organised by the League of Nations Union “in defence of freedom and peace”, quoted in The Times (4 December 1936), p. 18

• If present dangers were to be averted there must be loyal aid from the whole masses of the people; there must be voluntary and spontaneous comradeship; and there must even be a measure of self-imposed discipline. … was it not time that the free nations, great or small, here or across the Atlantic Ocean, should take measures necessary to place themselves in a state of security and in a state of adequate defence, not only for their own safety but also that they might hold aloft the beacon-lights of freedom which would carry their rays of encouragement to the thinker and toiler in every land?
  • Speech at the Albert Hall, London (3 December 1936) at a cross-party meeting organised by the League of Nations Union “in defence of freedom and peace”, quoted in The Times (4 December 1936), p. 18

• Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, ‘it is the quality which guarantees all others.’
  • In Great Contemporaries, “Alfonso XIII” (1937).

• The essence and foundation of House of Commons debating is formal conversation. The set speech, the harangue addressed to constituents, or to the wider public out of doors, has never succeeded much in our small wisely-built chamber. To do any good you have got to get down to grips with the subject and in human touch with the audience.
  • In Great Contemporaries, “Clemenceau” (1937).

• Whatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly foundations. No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
  • In Great Contemporaries, “Lord Rosebery” (1937).

• It is a strange thing that certain parts of the world should now be wishing to revive the old religious war. There are those non-God religions Nazism and Communism . . . I repudiate both and will have nothing to do with either . . . They are as alike as two peas. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were violently contrasted compared with them. You leave out God and you substitute the devil.
  • Manchester Guardian (26 January 1937) speech at Leeds Chamber of Commerce

• I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
  • To the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine.

• Many Japanese speak English. But they do not think our thoughts. They worship at other shrines; profess another creed; observe a different code. They can no more be moved by Christian pacifism than wolves by the bleating of sheep. We have to deal with a people whose values are in many respects altogether different from our own.
  • The Mission of Japan, Collier’s, 20 February 1937.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 365. ISBN 0903988429

• I do not believe in a major war this year because the French army at present is as large as that of Germany and far more mature. But next year and the year after may carry these Dictator-ridden countries to the climax of their armament and of their domestic embarrassments. We shall certainly need to be ready then.
  • Letter to Lord Linlithgow (23 September 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 870

• The wars fanned the wings of science, and science brought to mankind a thousand blessings, a thousand problems and a thousand perils.
  • This Age of Government by Great Dictators, News of the World, 10 October 1937
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 395. ISBN 0903988453

• You cannot expect English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerances of Nazidom. … We certainly do not wish to pursue a policy inimical to the legitimate interests of Germany, but you must surely be aware that when the German Government speaks of friendship with England, what they mean is that we shall give them back their former Colonies, and also agree to their having a free hand so far as we are concerned in Central and Southern Europe. This means that they would devour Austria and Czecho-Slovakia as a preliminary to making a gigantic middle Europe-block. It would certainly not be in our interests to connive at such policies of aggression.
  • Letter to Lord Londonderry (23 October 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 873

• Three hundred years ago it would have seemed absurd to say that this black mineral, this sea-coal, which could be used as a substitute for wood to burn in one’s grate, could be applied to revolutionize human affairs. Today we know that there is another source of energy a million times greater. We have not yet learned how to harness it or apply it, but it is there. Occasionally in complicated processes in the laboratory a scientist observes transmutations, re-arrangements in the core of the atom, which is known as the nucleus, which generate power at a rate hundreds of thousands of times greater than is produced when coal is burned and when, as the scientists put it, a carbon atom satisfied its affinity for an oxygen molecule. It can scarcely be doubted that a way to induce and control these effects can be found. The new fire is laid, but the particular kind of match is missing.
  • Vision of the Future Through Eyes of Science, News of the World, 31 October 1937
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 414. ISBN 0903988453

• The peace of Europe dwells under the shield of the French Army. But in a few years the German Army will be much larger than the French and increasingly its equal in maturity. The deadly years of our policy were 1934 and 1935. “The years that the locusts have eaten.” I expect we shall experience the consequences of these years in the near future.
  • Letter to Lord Linlithgow (3 November 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 886

• I have to come to think myself in the last lap of life that one should always look back upon the history of the past, study it and meditate upon it. Thus one learns the main line of advance…it is wrong to be bound by the events and commitments of the last few years, unless these are sound and compatible with the main historic line. I am sure the right course is to know as much as possible about all that has happened in the world, and then to act entirely upon the merits from day to day. Of course, my ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour. Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.
  • Letter to Lord Linlithgow (3 November 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 886

• Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
  • “Armistice – or Peace?”, published in The Evening Standard (11 November 1937).

• The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.
  • Mankind is Confronted by One Supreme Task, News of the World, 14 November 1937
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 421. ISBN 0903988453

• …it is a horrible thing that a race of people should be attempted to be blotted out of the society in which they have been born, that from their earliest years little children should be segregated and that they should be exposed to scorn and odium. It is very painful. Moreover, it is not only in regard to Jews that there is intolerance. Religious opinions, Protestant and Catholic alike, are subject to a prejudice of which we fondly hoped and were brought up to believe, the nineteenth century had rid the world.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (21 December 1937) on the Nazis

• The dictator Powers of Europe are striding on from strength to strength and from stroke to stroke, and the parliamentary democracies are retreating abashed and confused. … Austria has been laid in thrall, and we do not know whether Czechoslovakia will not suffer a similar attack. … It is because we have lost these opportunities of standing firm, of having strong united forces and a good heart, and a resolute desire to defend the right and afterwards to do generously as the result of strength; it is because we have lost these successive opportunities which have presented themselves, that, when our resources are less and the dangers greater, we have been brought to this pass. I predict that the day will come when at some point or other on some issue or other you will have to make a stand, and I pray God that when that day comes we may not find that through an unwise policy we are left to make that stand alone.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (22 February 1938) after the resignation of the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden

• For five years I have talked to the House on these matters – not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet. [ … ] Look back upon the last five years – since, that is to say, Germany began to rearm in earnest and openly to seek revenge … historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind! Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms in the field and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery. That is the position – that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (24 March 1938) “Foreign Affairs and Rearmament”, 12 days after the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria).

• The shores of History are strewn with the wrecks of Empires.
  • Peopling the Wide, Open Spaces of Empire, News of the World, 22 May 1938
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 444. ISBN 0903988453

• Everything is overshadowed by the impending trial of will-power which is developing in Europe. I think we shall have to choose in the next few weeks between war and shame, and I have very little doubt what the decision will be.
  • Letter to David Lloyd George (13 August 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 962

• Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feel­ing is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a lit­tle later on even more adverse terms than at present.
  • Letter to Lord Moyne (September 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 972

• The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to England nor to France. On the contrary, it will place these two nations in an ever weaker and more dangerous situation. … It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced, but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion. The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measure necessary for their defence.
  • Statement to the Press (21 September 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 978-979

• It is the end of the British Empire.
  • Remark to Harold Nicolson (22 September 1938) after Neville Chamberlain flew to Godesberg to meet Hitler, quoted in Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930-1964 (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 134

• …we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and that France has suffered even more than we have. … The utmost my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been able to secure by all his immense exertions, by all the great efforts and mobilisation which took place in this country, and by all the anguish and strain through which we have passed in this country, the utmost he has been able to gain…for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness. She has suffered in every respect by her association with the Western democracies and with the League of Nations, of which she has always been an obedient servant.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• We in this country, as in other Liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian States who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• I venture to think that in future the Czechoslovak State cannot be maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. … It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years—five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defences.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that. It must now be accepted that all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi Power. The system of alliances in Central Europe upon which France has relied for her safety has been swept away, and I can see no means by which it can be reconstituted. … If the Nazi dictator should choose to look westward, as he may, bitterly will France and England regret the loss of that fine army of ancient Bohemia which was estimated last week to require not fewer than 30 German divisions for its destruction.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France. … You have to consider the character of the Nazi movement and the rule which it implies. The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations with the German people. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi Power, that Power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure. It is to prevent that that I have tried my best to urge the maintenance of every bulwark of defence—first the timely creation of an Air Force superior to anything within striking distance of our shores; secondly, the gathering together of the collective strength of many nations; and thirdly, the making of alliances and military conventions, all within the Covenant, in order to gather together forces at any rate to restrain the onward movement of this Power. It has all been in vain. Every position has been successively undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week—I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement

• The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains.
  • Winston Churchill, in “The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)”, radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938).

• People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like — they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
  • Winston Churchill, in “The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)”, radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938).

• I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor. … Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.
  • “Mr. Churchill’s Reply” in The Times (7 November 1938).

• Are we going to make a supreme additional effort to remain a great Power, or are we going to slide away into what seem to be easier, softer, less strenuous, less harassing courses, with all the tremendous renunciations which that decision implies? Is not this the moment when all should hear the deep, repeated strokes of the alarm bell, and when all should resolve that it shall be a call to action, and not the knell of our race and fame?
  • Speech in the House of Commons (17 November 1938)

• The Prime Minister said…that where I failed, for all my brilliant gifts, was in the faculty of judging. I will gladly submit my judgement about foreign affairs and national defence during the last five years, in comparison with his own. … In February the Prime Minister said the tension in Europe had greatly relaxed. A few weeks later Nazi Germany seized Austria. I predicted that he would repeat this statement as soon as the shock of the rape of Austria passed away. He did so in the very same words at the end of July. By the middle of August Germany was mobilising…which…ended in the complete destruction and absorption of the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia. … in November…he told us that Europe was settling down to a more peaceful state. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the Nazi atrocities on the Jewish population resounded throughout the civilised world.
  • Speech in Chingford (9 December 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 1025

• In 1934 I warned Mr. Baldwin that the Germans had a secret Air Force and were rapidly overhauling ours. I gave definite figures and forecasts. Of course, it was all denied with all the weight of official authority. I was depicted a scaremonger. Less than six months after Mr. Baldwin had to come down to the House and admit he was wrong. … He got more applause for making this mistake, which may prove fatal to the British Empire and to British freedom, than ordinary people would do after they rendered some great service which added to its security and power. Well, Mr. Chamberlain was, next to Mr. Baldwin, the most powerful Member of that Government. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He knew all the facts. His judgment failed just like that of Mr. Baldwin and we are are suffering from the consequences today.
  • Speech in Chingford (9 December 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 1026

• To say that an arms race always leads to war seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. A government resolved to attain ends detrimental to its neighbours, which does not shrink from the possibility of war, makes preparations for war, its neighbours take defensive action, and you say an arms race is beginning. But this is the symptom of the intention of one government to challenge or destroy its neighbours, not the cause of the conflict. The pace is set by the potential aggressor, and, failing collective action by the rest of the world to resist him, the alternatives are an arms race or surrender.
  • Interview with Kingsley Martin for the New Statesman (7 January 1939)

• War is horrible, but slavery is worse, and you may be sure that the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude.
  • Interview with Kingsley Martin for the New Statesman (7 January 1939)

• In the main, the theme is emerging of the growth of freedom and law, of the rights of the individual, of the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community. Of these ideas the English-speaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions. Thus I condemn tyranny in whatever guise and from whatever quarter it presents itself. All this of course has a current application.
  • Letter to Maurice Ashley (12 April 1939) on his work on A History of the English Speaking Peoples, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 1063

The Second World War (1939–1945)

• Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a nation. How it makes it abject in peace and proves it abominable in war.
  • Part of a speech played on the documentary Timewatch – Russia: A Century of Suspicion.

• I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
  • BBC broadcast (“The Russian Enigma”), London, October 1, 1939 (partial text, transcript of the “First Month of War” speech).

• First, Poland has been again overrun by two of the great powers which held her in bondage for 150 years but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defence of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible, and that she will rise again like a rock which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave but which remains a rock.
  • BBC broadcast (“The Russian Enigma”), London, October 1, 1939 (First Month of War (excerpt), transcript of the full text).

• The traditional British view is that character is what matters in a general. They like a solid, simple man, with no newfangled nonsense about him. He should be preternaturally silent. If by chance he thinks at all he should not let this leak out, otherwise confidence would be destroyed.
  • Today’s Battles. Collier’s, 7 October 1939.
  • Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 487. ISBN 0903988429

• The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe. Even in Germany itself there are millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine. Let them take courage amid perplexities and perils, for it may well be that the final extinction of a baleful domination will pave the way to a broader solidarity of all the men in all the lands than we could ever have planned if we had not marched together through the fire.
  • Broadcast (12 November 1939), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 81

• In the bitter and increasingly exacting conflict which lies before us we are resolved to keep nothing back, and not to be outstripped by any in service to the common cause. Let the great cities of Warsaw, of Prague, of Vienna banish despair even in the midst of their agony. Their liberation is sure. The day will come when the joybells will ring again throughout Europe, and when victorious nations, masters not only of their foes but of themselves, will plan and build in justice, in tradition, and in freedom a house of many mansions where there will be room for all.
  • Broadcast (20 January 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 138

• I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is 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.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, after taking office as Prime Minister (13 May 1940) This has often been misquoted in the form: “I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears …”
  • The Official Report, House of Commons (5th Series), 13 May 1940, vol. 360, c. 1502. Audio records of the speech do spare out the “It is” before the in the beginning of the “Victory”-Part.

• I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister, in a solemn hour of the life of our country, of our Empire, of our Allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom. … I am sure I speak for all when I say we are ready to face it; to endure it; and to retaliate against it—to any extent that the unwritten laws of war permit. There will be many men and women in this Island who when the ordeal comes upon them, as come it will, will feel comfort, and even a pride, that they are sharing the perils of our lads at the Front—soldiers, sailors and airmen, God bless them—and are drawing away from them a part at least of the onslaught they have to bear. Is not this the appointed time for all to make the utmost exertions in their power?
  • Broadcast (19 May 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 363

• We have differed and quarrelled in the past but now one bond unites us all—to wage war until victory is won, and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony must be.
  • Broadcast (19 May 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 364

• Side by side … the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue … mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them … gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians — upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.
  • Radio broadcast, Be Ye Men of Valour, May 19, 1940 (partial text).

• I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering negotiations with That Man. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called ‘disarmament’—our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up—under Mosley or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other hand, we had immense reserves and advantages. And I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
  • Speech to the Cabinet (28 May 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 420

• I believe we shall make them rue the day they try to invade our island. No such discussion can be permitted.
  • Minute (1 June 1940) in response to the Foreign Office’s suggestion that preparations should be made for the evacuation of the Royal Family and the British Government to “some part of the Overseas Empire”, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 449

• No, bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.
  • Minute (1 June 1940) in response to the suggestion of Kenneth Clark (Director of the National Gallery) that the National Gallery’s paintings should be sent to Canada, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 449

• Every morn brought forth a noble chance, and every chance brought forth a noble knight.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, June 4, 1940; passage praising the airmen of the Royal Air Force and their efforts during the evacuation of Dunkirk. This is a close paraphrase of Tennyson:
    • When every morning brought a noble chance,
      And every chance brought out a noble knight.
    • Alfred Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”, stanza 23 (1842), and the expanded “The Passing of Arthur”, stanza 36 in Idylls of the King (1856–1885)

• 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, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (4 June 1940).

• Enterprises must be prepared, with specially-trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror down these coasts, first of all on the “butcher and bolt” policy; but later on, or perhaps as soon as we are organised, we could surprise Calais or Boulogne, kill and capture the Hun garrison, and hold the place until all preparations to reduce it by siege or heavy storm have been made, and then away. The passive resistance war, in which we have acquitted ourselves so well, must come to an end. I look to the Joint Chiefs of the Staff to propose me measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline.
  • Minute to General Ismay, 6 June 1940.
  • Reproduced in The Second World War, Vol II, Their Finest Hour, 1949, Cassell & Co Ltd, p. 217.

• The news from France is very bad, and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune. Nothing will alter our feelings towards them or our faith that the genius of France will rise again. What has happened in France makes no difference to our actions and purpose. We have become the sole champions now in arms to defend the world cause. We shall do our best to be worthy of this high honour. We shall defend our Island home, and with the British Empire we shall fight on unconquerable until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of mankind. We are sure that in the end all will come right.
  • Broadcast (17 June 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 566

• Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 “War Situation”.

• Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’
  • Speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 “War Situation”.

• Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilisation; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen—we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or—what is perhaps a harder test—a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.
  • Broadcast (14 July 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 664

• This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warrior; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.
  • Broadcast (14 July 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 665

• And now go and set Europe ablaze
  • Entry from Monday 22 July 1940, foundation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)
  • Dalton, Hugh (1986). The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-45. Jonathan Cape. p. 62. ISBN 022402065X

• The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, also known as “The Few”, made on 20 August 1940. However Churchill first made his comment, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” to General Hastings Ismay as they got into their car to leave RAF Uxbridge on 16 August 1940 after monitoring the battle from the Operations Room.Farewell to RAF Uxbridge. Global Aviation Resource (6 April 2010). Retrieved on 12 September 2010. Crozier, Hazel. RAF Uxbridge 90th Anniversary 1917–2007. RAF High Wycombe: Air Command Media Services. Churchill repeated the quote in a speech to Parliament four days later complimenting the pilots in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. The speech in the House of Commons is often incorrectly cited as the origin of the popular phrase “never was so much owed by so many to so few”. Queen Elizabeth II during her speech in Polish Parliament 26.03.1996 said that Churchill said “so few” about unforgettable and brave Polish pilots from Battle of Britain.

• Now that they have begun to molest the capital, I want you to hit them hard − and Berlin is the place to hit them.
  • To the Chief of the Air Staff (26 August 1940) after the Luftwaffe bombed London, quoted in John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 230

• We cannot tell when they will try to come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will come at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy full-scale invasion of this Island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched at any time now. … Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important week for us in our history. It ranks with the days of the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past. Every man and every woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty, whatever it may be, with special pride and care.
  • Broadcast (11 September 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 778

• These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler’s invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty imperial city … Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners.
  • Radio broadcast during the London Blitz, September 11, 1940. Quoted by Martin Gilbert in Churchill: A Life, Macmillan (1992), p. 675 ISBN 0805023968

• This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatreds, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World—and the New—can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man’s honour, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.
  • Broadcast (11 September 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 779

• We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.
  • Radio broadcast, London, Dieu Protège La France [God protect France], October 21, 1940 (partial text).

• Goodnight then: sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France! Long live also the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age.
  • Radio broadcast, London, Dieu Protège La France [God protect France], October 21, 1940 (partial text).

• We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.
  • Radio broadcast to German occupied, Vichy, and Free France (21 October 1940)

• Hitler, in one of his recent discourses, declared that the fight was between those who have been through the Adolf Hitler Schools and those who have been at Eton. Hitler has forgotten Harrow.
  • Speech to Harrow School (18 December 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 949

• When this war is won by this nation, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to work to establish a state of society where the advantage and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many and the youth of the nation as a whole.
  • Speech to Harrow School (18 December 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 950

• The hour has come; kill the Hun.
  • How Churchill said he would end his speech if Germany invaded Britain (John Colville’s diary entry for January 25, 1941). In The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), ed. Gilbert, W.W. Norton, pp. 132–133 ISBN 0393019594

• In order to win this war Hitler must destroy Great Britain. He may carry havoc into the Balkan States; he may tear great provinces out of Russia; he may march to the Caspian; he may march to the gates of India. All this will avail him nothing. It may spread his curse more widely throughout Europe and Asia, but it will not avert his doom. With every month that passes the many proud and once happy countries he is now holding down by brute force and vile intrigue are learning to hate the Prussian yoke and the Nazi name as nothing has ever been hated so fiercely and so widely among men before. And all the time, masters of the sea and air, the British Empire—nay, in a certain sense, the whole English-speaking world—will be on his track bearing with them the swords of justice.
  • Broadcast (9 February 1941), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1009

• Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us. … We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
  • BBC radio broadcast, February 9, 1941. In The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), ed. Gilbert, W.W. Norton, pp. 199–200 ISBN 0393019594

• I must point out … that the British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst, and like to be told that they are very likely to get much worse in the future and must prepare themselves for further reverses.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, June 10, 1941 “Defence of Crete”, in The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), Churchill/Gilbert, Norton, p. 785 ISBN 0393019594

• If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
  • To his personal secretary John Colville the evening before Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As quoted by Andrew Nagorski in The Greatest Battle (2007), Simon & Schuster, pp. 150–151 ISBN 0743281101

• No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. … I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.
  • Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1120

• I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.
  • Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 1120-1121

• I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be? We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us—nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe. That is our policy and that is our declaration. It follows therefore that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.
  • Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1121

• Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorised into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine — which we and the rest of the civilised world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing — cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. … So now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.
  • Radio broadcast on the German invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941. In The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), W.W. Norton, pp. 835–836 ISBN 0393019594

• We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their votes as to whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all cities, an overwhelming majority would cry, “No, we will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, they have meted out to us.” {applause} The people of London with one voice would say to Hitler: “You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We remember Warsaw! In the first few days of the war. We remember Rotterdam. We have been newly reminded of your habits by the hideous massacre in Belgrade. We know too well the bestial assaults you’re making upon the Russian people, to whom our hearts go out in their valiant struggle! {cheers} We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will! You do your worst! — and we will do our best! {sustained cheering} Perhaps it may be our turn soon. Perhaps it may be our turn now.”
  • July 14, 1941, in a speech before the London County Council. The original can be found in Churchill’s The Unrelenting Struggle (English edition 187; American edition 182) or in the Complete Speeches VI:6448.

• The Russian Armies and all the peoples of the Russian Republic have rallied to the defence of their hearths and homes. … The aggressor is surprised, startled, staggered. For the first time in his experience mass murder has become unprofitable. He retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler’s tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.
  • Broadcast (24 August 1941), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1173

• Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
  • Speech given at Harrow School, Harrow, England, October 29, 1941. Quoted in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, 2008, p. 23 ISBN 1586486381

• We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.
  • Speech before Joint Session of the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa (December 30, 1941)
  • The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press (2006), p. 153 ISBN 0300107986

• When we consider the resources of the United States and the British Empire compared to those of Japan, when we remember those of China, which has so long and valiantly withstood invasion and when also we observe the Russian menace which hangs over Japan, it becomes still more difficult to reconcile Japanese action with prudence or even with sanity. What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realise that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?
  Members of the Senate and members of the House of Representatives, I turn for one moment more from the turmoil and convulsions of the present to the broader basis of the future. Here we are together facing a group of mighty foes who seek our ruin; here we are together defending all that to free men is dear. Twice in a single generation the catastrophe of world war has fallen upon us; twice in our lifetime has the long arm of fate reached across the ocean to bring the United States into the forefront of the battle. If we had kept together after the last War, if we had taken common measures for our safety, this renewal of the curse need never have fallen upon us.
  Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, to mankind tormented, to make sure that these catastrophes shall not engulf us for the third time?
  • Speech to a joint session of the United States Congress, Washington, D.C. (26 December 1941).

• ‘It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.
  • Ending of the Speech to a joint session of the United States Congress, Washington, D.C. (26 December 1941); reported in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (1974), vol. 6, p. 6541. The Congressional Record reports that this speech was followed by “Prolonged applause, the Members of the Senate and their guests rising”; Congressional Record, vol. 87, p. 10119.

• When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! Some neck!
  • Reference to the French government; speech before Joint Session of the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa (December 30, 1941)
  • The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press (2006), p. 153 ISBN 0300107986

• The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black.
  • Quote about the (April 5, 1942) Easter Sunday Raid on Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka). From a conversation at the British Embassy, Washington D.C., as described by Leonard Birchall, RCAF, in Battle for the Skies (2004), Michael Paterson, David & Charles, ISBN 0715318152

• If Gandhi tries to start a really hostile movement against us in this crisis, I am of the opinion that he should be arrested, and that both British and United States opinion would support such a step. If he likes to starve himself to death, we cannot help that.
  • Minute (14 June 1942) to the Secretary of State for India before Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941-1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 123

• This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war….It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.
  • The Fall of Tobruk, 20 June 1942.
  • The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951) Chapter XII. pp. 343-4.
• It was an experience of great interest to me to meet Premier Stalin … It is very fortunate for Russia in her agony to have this great rugged war chief at her head. He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy times in which his life has been cast; a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power and a man direct and even blunt in speech, which, having been brought up in the House of Commons, I do not mind at all, especially when I have something to say of my own. Above all, he is a man with that saving sense of humour which is of high importance to all men and all nations, but particularly to great men and great nations. Stalin also left upon me the impression of a deep, cool wisdom and a complete absence of illusions of any kind. I believe I made him feel that we were good and faithful comrades in this war – but that, after all, is a matter which deeds not words will prove.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, September 8, 1942 “War Situation”.

• I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.
  • In conversation to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India. This quotation is widely cited as written in “a letter to Leo Amery” (e.g., in “Jolly Good Fellows and Their Nasty Ways” by Vinay Lal in Times of India (15 January 2007)) but it is actually attributed to Churchill as a remark, in an entry for September 1942 in Leo Amery : Diaries (1988), edited John Barnes and David Nicholson, p. 832 : “During my talk with Winston he burst out with: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’.”

• Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
  • speech at Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, London, November 10, 1942 : (partial text)
  • Referring to the British victory over the German Afrika Korps at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt.

• The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1942 Debate on the address.

• I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
  • speech at Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, London, November 10, 1942
  • The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press (2006), p. 153 ISBN 0300107986

• Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.
  • The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951) Chapter 33 (The Battle of Alamein)
  • BBC News story on the 60th anniversary of Alamein.

• The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter: ‘Paralysis.’
  • Minute [brief note] to General Ismay, December 6, 1942, on proposed improvements to landing-craft.
  • In The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951), Appendix C.

• I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen, who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry. The tightest hand should be kept over them, and they should not be allowed to quarter themselves in large numbers among Fighting Services at the public expense.
  • On psychiatrists, in a letter to John Anderson, Lord President of the Council (December 19, 1942)
  • In The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951), Appendix C.

• There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
  • Radio broadcast (March 21, 1943), cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 21 ISBN 1586486381

• By its sudden collapse, … the proud German army has once again proved the truth of the saying, ‘The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet’.
  • Speech before a Joint Session of Congress (May 19, 1943), Washington, D.C., in Never Give In! : The best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (2003), Hyperion, p. 352 ISBN 1401300561

• The price of greatness is responsibility.
• The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
  • Speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943 (full text, audio).

• To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go.
  • Speech to Parliament, September 21, 1943. Quoted in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (2008) by Patrick J Buchanan, p. 396.

• I have nothing to add to the reply which has already been sent.
  • Response to Dundee Council after refusing to expand on his reasons for not accepting the Freedom of the City Memo (October 27, 1943).

• I hate nobody except Hitler — and that is professional.
  • Churchill to John Colville during WWII, quoted by Colville in his book The Churchillians (1981) ISBN 0297779095

• Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage
  • “The Coalmining Situation”, Speech to the House of Commons (October 13, 1943)^[7]

• We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
  • Speech to the House of Commons (October 28, 1943), on plans for the rebuilding of the Chamber (destroyed by an enemy bomb May 10, 1941), in Never Give In! : The best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (2003), Hyperion, p. 358 ISBN 1401300561

• The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges. Harangues from a rostrum would be a bad substitute for the conversational style in which so much of our business is done. But the conversational style requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency. There should be a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House. … It has a collective personality which enjoys the regard of the public, and which imposes itself upon the conduct not only of individual Members but of parties.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 “House of Commons Rebuilding”.

• The House of Commons has lifted our affairs above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere. It thrives on criticism, it is perfectly impervious to newspaper abuse or taunts from any quarter, and it is capable of digesting almost anything or almost any body of gentlemen, whatever be the views with which they arrive. There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws; its traditions and its privileges are as lively today as when it broke the arbitrary power of the Crown and substituted that Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 “House of Commons Rebuilding”.

• You might however consider whether you should not unfold as a background the great privilege of habeas corpus and trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the English people for ordinary individuals against the state. The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.
  • In a telegram (November 21, 1942) by Churchill from Cairo, Egypt to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison; cited in In the Highest Degree Odious (1992), Simpson, Clarendon Press, p. 391 ISBN 0198257759

• When I make a statement of facts within my knowledge I expect it to be accepted.
  • To Joseph Stalin in 1944, on the fact that there had been no plot between Britain and Germany to invade the Soviet Union. The Grand Alliance, Winston S. Churchill.

• The object of presenting medals, stars, and ribbons is to give pride and pleasure to those who have deserved them. At the same time a distinction is something which everybody does not possess. If all have it it is of less value … A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, March 22, 1944 “War Decorations”.

• I have left the obvious, essential fact till this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, August 2, 1944.^[8]

• I salute Marshal Stalin, the great champion, and I firmly believe that our 20 years’ treaty with Russia will prove to be one of the most lasting and durable factors in preserving the peace and the good order and the progress of Europe.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, August 2, 1944.^[8]

• I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.
  • Conversation with Lord Moran, August 14, 1944.
  • Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (London: Constable & Company, 1966), p. 167.
• The Russians will sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihiliation.
  • To Stanisław Mikołajczyk in Moscow, October 14, 1944. Quoted in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (2008) by Patrick J Buchanan, p. 380.

• A love of tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril; but the new view must come, the world must roll forward … Let us have no fear of the future.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, November 29, 1944 “Debate on the Address”.

• I hope very much that the archway into the Chamber from the Inner Lobby—where the Bar used to be—which was smitten by the blast of the explosion, and has acquired an appearance of antiquity that might not have been achieved by the hand of time in centuries, will be preserved intact, as a monument of the ordeal which Westminster has passed through in the Great War, and as a reminder to those who will come centuries after us that they may look back from time to time upon their forbears who “kept the bridge In the brave days of old.”
  • Rebuilding the House of Commons, Speech to the House of Commons, 25 January 1945.
• It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.
  • After the devastation of Dresden by aerial bombing, and the resulting fire storm (February 1945). Quoted in Where the Right Went Wrong (2004) by Patrick J Buchanan, p. 119 ISBN 0312341156

• It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, February 27, 1945 “Crimea Conference”; in The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (1954), Chapter XXIII – Yalta: Finale.

• Personally, having lived through all these European disturbances and studied carefully their causes, I am of the opinion that if the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had not imagined that the sweeping away of long-established dynasties was a form of progress, and if they had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach, and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler. To Germany, a symbolic point on which the loyalties of the military classes could centre would have been found, and a democratic basis of society might have been preserved by a crowned Weimar in contact with the victorious Allies.
  • Telegram (26 April 1945) to Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, British Ambassador to Turkey, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941-1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 1314

• We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued. The injury she has inflicted on Great Britain, the United States, and other countries, and her detestable cruelties, call for justice and retribution. We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.
  • Broadcast (8 May 1945) from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941-1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 1344

• We all of us made our mistakes, but the strength of the Parliamentary institution has been shown to enable it at the same moment to preserve all the title-deeds of democracy while waging war in the most stern and protracted form. I wish to give my hearty thanks to men of all Parties, to everyone in every part of the House wherever they sit, for the way in which the liveliness of Parliamentary institutions has been maintained under the fire of the enemy, and for the way in which we have been able to persevere—and we could have persevered much longer if need had been—till all the objectives which we set before us for the procuring of the unlimited and unconditional surrender of the enemy had been achieved.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (8 May 1945), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941-1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 1346

• God bless you all. This is your victory! [crowd: “No—it is yours.”] It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attack of the enemy, have in any way weakened the independent resolve of the British nation. God bless you all.
  • Speech to the crowd from the balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall, London (8 May 1945), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941-1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 1347

• Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. A Free Parliament—look at that—a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire.
  • Broadcast (4 June 1945) for the 1945 general election, quoted in Martin Gilbert, ‘Never Despair’: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 33

• No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil Servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?
  • Broadcast (4 June 1945) for the 1945 general election, quoted in Martin Gilbert, ‘Never Despair’: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 32

• My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward in the main by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of the century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its form, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its form, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
  • Broadcast (4 June 1945) for the 1945 general election, quoted in Martin Gilbert, ‘Never Despair’: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 33-34

• How is an ordinary citizen or subject of the King to stand up against this formidable machine, which, once it is in power, will prescribe for every one of them where they are to work; what they are to work at; where they may go and what they may say; what views they are to hold and within what limits they may express them; where their wives are to go to queue up for the State ration; and what education their children are to receive to mould their views of human liberty and conduct in the future?
  • Broadcast (4 June 1945) for the 1945 general election, quoted in Martin Gilbert, ‘Never Despair’: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 34

• I spoke of the melancholy financial position of Great Britain. Half our foreign investments had been spent in the common cause when we stood alone. There is a great external debt of three thousand million pounds. We should require time to get on our feet again. The President listened closely, attentively and sympathetically. He spoke of the immense debt the Allies owed to Britain for that period when she fought alone. “If you had gone like France,” he added, “we might well be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time.”
  • Churchill’s account of his conversation with President Truman (18 July 1945), quoted in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 298

• I am going to tell you something you must not tell to any human being. We have split the atom. The report of the great experiment has just come in. A bomb was let off in some wild spot in New Mexico. It was only a thirteen-pound bomb, but it made a crater half a mile across. People ten miles away lay with their feet towards the bomb; when it went off they rolled over and tried to look at the sky. But even with the darkest glasses it was impossible. It was the middle of the night, but it was as if seven suns had lit the earth; two hundred miles away the light could be seen. The bomb sent up smoke into the stratosphere…It is the Second Coming. The secret has been wrested from nature…Fire was the first discovery; this is the second.
  • Conversation with his doctor, Lord Moran (23 July 1945), quoted in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 305

Post-war years (1945–1955)

• The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (October 22, 1945) “Demobilisation”

• [Christopher Soames, Churchill’s future son-in-law, remembered] Churchill showing him around Chartwell Farm [around 1946]. When they came to the piggery Churchill scratched one of the pigs and said: I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
  • Christopher Soames, speech at the Reform Club (28 April 1981), reported in Martin S. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Volume Eight: Never Despair: 1945–1965. p. 304

• Meeting Roosevelt was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne.
  • Winston Churchill’s visit to FDR’s grave site at Hyde Park, NY, reflecting on his past and the relationship he had with FDR, as quoted in PBS series, American Experience [The Presidents: FDR]

• I think ‘No Comment’ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.
  • After using the phrase when interviewed by reporters in Miami on 12 February, 1946; quoted in Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later by James W. Muller, University of Missouri Press (1999), p. 20 ISBN 0826261221

• The very first thing the President did was to show me the new Presidential Seal, which he had just redesigned. He explained, ‘The seal has to go everywhere the President goes. It must be displayed upon the lectern when he speaks. The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re-designed it so that it now faces the olive branches … what do you think?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, with the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle’s neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.’
  • An exchange (March 4, 1946) with Harry S. Truman aboard the Presidential train in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station before journeying to Fulton, Missouri; as quoted in “The Genius and Wit of Winston Churchill” by Robin Lawson.

• When I was a young subaltern in the South African War, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable we had to put a bit of whiskey in it. By diligent effort I learned to like it.
  • Aboard the Presidential train during the journey to Fulton, Missouri (March 4, 1946); quoted in Conflict and Crisis by Robert Donovan, University of Missouri Press (1996), p. 190 ISBN 082621066X

• A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory…. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
  • On Soviet communism and the Cold War, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946 (complete text). Churchill did not coin the phrase “iron curtain”, however; the 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia by English suffragette Ethel Snowden contained the line “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!” (This fact is mentioned in the article ‘Anonymous was a Woman’, Yale Alumni Magazine Jan/Feb 2011).

• We must build a kind of United States of Europe.
  • Speech at Zurich University (September 19, 1946) (partial text) ([3]).

• We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward cross the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.
  • Speech at Zurich University (September 19, 1946) (partial text) ([4]).

• Is there any need for further floods of agony? Is the only lesson of history to be that mankind is unteachable? Let there be justice, mercy and freedom. The people have only to will it, and all will achieve their hearts’ desire.
  • Speech at Zurich University (September 19, 1946) (partial text) ([5]).

• The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny.
  • Speech at Zurich University (September 19, 1946) (partial text) ([6]).

• There is less there than meets the eye.
  • On Prime Minister Clement Attlee, to President Truman, in 1946. When Truman defended Attlee (‘He seems a modest sort of fellow’), Churchill replied ‘He’s got a lot to be modest about.’ As cited in The Origins of the Cold War in Europe (1994), Reynolds, Yale University Press, p. 93 ISBN 0300105622

• I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is that, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.
  • When Churchill was in opposition after 1945, he led the Conservative Party in a debate about the Health Service. As he listened to Aneurin Bevan’s opening speech, he called for some statistics about infant mortality … [which were] supplied, copiously and accurately, by Iain Macleod, then working in the back rooms of the Conservative Research Department. But, in his speech, Churchill made only one bold and sweeping use … [of Macleod’s detailed research]. Encountering MacLeod afterward, Churchill made the above statement. As cited in The Life of Politics (1968), Henry Fairlie, Methuen, pp. 203-204.

• It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire, with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind. … Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (6 March 1947) on Indian independence

• When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.
  • In the House of Commons (18 April 1947), cited in The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (1996), Jay, Oxford University Press, p. 93.

• When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.
  • Reply to King George VI, on a cold morning at the airport. The King had asked if Churchill would take something to warm himself. As cited in Man of the Century (2002), Ramsden, Columbia University Press, p. 134 ISBN 0231131062

• All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honour; Duty; Mercy; Hope.
  • United Europe Meeting, Albert Hall, London (May 14, 1947). Cited in Churchill by Himself, ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs (2008), p. 26 ISBN 1586486381

• Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (11 November 1947), published in 206–07 The Official Report, House of Commons (5th Series), 11 November 1947, vol. 444, cc.

• I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
  • On his 75th birthday (1947), in reply to a question on whether he was afraid of death, quoted in the N. Y. Times Magazine on November 1, 1964, p. 40 according to Quote It Completely! (1998), Gerhart, Wm. S. Hein Publishing, p. 262 ISBN 1575884003

• One foggy afternoon in November 1947 I was painting in my studio… when I suddenly felt an odd sensation. I turned round… and there, sitting in my red leather upright armchair, was my father. He looked just as I had seen him in his prime…
  [towards the end of their conversation] “Papa,” I said, “in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs… Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.”… He said:
  “Winston, you have told me a terrible tale. I would never have believed that such things could happen. I am glad I did not live to see them. As I listened to you unfolding these fearful facts you seemed to know a great deal about them. I never expected that you would develop so far and so fully. Of course you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help…”
  He gave me a benignant smile. He then took the match to light his cigarette and struck it. There was a tiny flash. He vanished. The chair was empty…
  • The Dream”: A Fictional Encounter – by Winston S. Churchill, reprinted from the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, by Martin Gilbert, vol. 8 Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), pages 365-72.

• For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (January 23, 1948), cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 154 ISBN 0300107986
  • This quote may be the basis for a statement often attributed to Churchill : History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it.

• I am shocked by this wicked crime.
  • Reaction to the assassination of Gandhi. Ottawa Citizen, Jan. 27, 1948.

• Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.
  • Speech (May 28, 1948) at the Scottish Unionist Conference, Perth, Scotland, in Never Give In! : The best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (2003), Hyperion, p. 446 ISBN 1401300561

• In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.
  • The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948) Moral of the Work, p. ix

• Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.
  • The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm, Mariner Books (1985), pp. 13-14. First published in 1948.

• One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
  • The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948).

• Their horse cavalry, of which they had twelve brigades, charged valiantly against the swarming tanks and armoured cars but could not harm them with their swords and lances.
  • On the Polish defense against Germany, in The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948).

• I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
  • On his appointment as Prime Minister, May 10, 1940; The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948).

• Those who are prone, by temperament and character, to seek sharp and clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenge comes from a foreign power, have not always been right. On the other hand, those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances they may be right, not only morally, but from a practical standpoint. How many wars have been averted by patience and persisting good will! Religion and virtue alike lend their sanctions to meekness and humility, not only between men but between nations. How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands! How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing! How often have countries fought cruel wars and then after a few years found themselves not only friends but allies!
  • The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948) Chapter 17 (The Tragedy of Munich), p .287

• Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
  • The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948) Chapter 19 (Prague, Albania, and the Polish Guarantee).

• Baldwin, Stanley … confesses putting party before country, 169-70; …
  • Index entry, The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948).

• I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.
  • In the House of Commons, (26 January 1949)^[9]

• If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
  • In the House of Commons (3 February 1949), as quoted in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 17 ISBN 1586486381

• Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.
  • Speech on receiving the London Times Literary Award November 2, 1949
  • Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, Hyperion (2003), p. 453 ISBN ISBN 1401300561

• The reason for having diplomatic relations is not to confer a compliment, but to secure a convenience.
  • In the House of Commons (17 November 1949) “Foreign Affairs”, on diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China, as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 16 ISBN 1586486381

• When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.
  • The Second World War, Volume II : Their Finest Hour (1949) Chapter 8 (September Tensions).

• The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.
  • The Second World War, Volume II : Their Finest Hour (1949) Chapter XXX (Ocean Peril). p. 529.
• War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
  • On the Soviet Union’s failure to form a united Balkan front against Hitler ; in The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance (1950) Chapter 20 (The Soviet Nemesis).

• No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.
  • The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance (1950) Chapter 32 (Pearl Harbor).

• Some people did not like this ceremonious style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
  • Churchill ended his December 8, 1941 letter to the Japanese Ambassador, declaring that a state of war now existed between the United Kingdom and Japan, with the courtly flourish “I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant”.
  • The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance (1950) Chapter 32 (Pearl Harbor).

• It excites world wonder in the Parliamentary countries that we should build a Chamber, starting afresh, which can only seat two-thirds of its Members. It is difficult to explain this to those who do not know our ways. They cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.
  • Speech in the House of Commons, October 24, 1950 “Motion for Address in Reply”.

• The object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (June 6, 1951) ; in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 22 ISBN 1586486381

• Let us look back on the conduct of Mr. Attlee and his friends in the years before the war. The Labour Party denounced the Baldwin Government for “planning a vast and expensive rearmament programme”…Mr. Attlee said on November 10, 1935: “The National Government is preparing a great programme of rearmament which will endanger the peace of the world”. Mr. Morrison, in the same month, said “the Government leaders are all urging a policy of rearmament, and Mr. Chamberlain is ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction”. I suppose those must have been the aeroplanes which saved us in the Battle of Britain. And, again: “Every vote for the Unionists would be a vote for an international race in arms, and a vote for that was a vote for war”. Such was the language of the Socialist leaders in the years while Hitler’s Germany was rearming night and day. … And yet…at the election of 1945, the Labour Party gained great credit by denouncing the Chamberlain Government as guilty men for not having made larger and more timely arrangements.
  • Speech in Woodford (12 October 1951), quoted in The Times (13 October 1951), p. 9

• I look back with pride to the great measures of social reform—Unemployment Insurance, Labour Exchanges, Safety in the Coalmines, bringing Old Age Pensions down from seventy to sixty-five years of age, the Widows’ and Orphans’ Pensions—for which I have been responsible both as a Liberal and a Conservative Minister. I find comfort in the broad harmony of thought which prevails between the modern Tory democracy and the doctrines of the famous Liberal leaders of the past. I am sure that in accord with their speeches and writings, men like Asquith, Morley and Grey, whom I knew so well in my youth, would have regarded the establishment of a Socialist State and the enforcement of the collectivist theory as one of the worst evils that could befall Britain and her slowly-evolved, long-cherished way of life.
  • Speech at Huddersfield Town Hall (15 October 1951), quoted in Winston Churchill, Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (London: Cassell & Co, 1953), p. 149

• I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, “Verify your quotations.”
  • The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951).

• Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.
  • Memo (May 30, 1942) to the Chief of Combined Operations on the design of floating piers (which later became Mulberry Harbours) for use on landing beaches; in The Second World War, Volume V : Closing the Ring (1952) Chapter 4 (Westward Ho! Synthetic Harbours).

• There are two main characteristics of the House of Commons which will command the approval and the support of reflective and experienced Members. The first is that its shape should be oblong and not semicircular. Here is a very potent factor in our political life. The semicircular assembly, which appeals to political theorists, enables every individual or every group to move round the centre, adopting various shades of pink according as the weather changes. I am a convinced supporter of the party system in preference to the group system. I have seen many earnest and ardent Parliaments destroyed by the group system. The party system is much favoured by the oblong form of chamber. It is easy for an individual to move through those insensible gradations from left to right, but the act of crossing the Floor is one which requires serious attention. I am well informed on this matter for I have accomplished that difficult process, not only once, but twice.
  • On the rebuilding of the House of Commons after a bomb blast. The Second World War, Volume V : Closing the Ring (1952) Chapter 9.

• Of course, when you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.
  • In The Second World War, Volume V : Closing the Ring (1952) Chapter 12 (Island Prizes Lost).

• ‘In war-time,’ I said, ‘truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
  • Discussion of Operation Overlord with Stalin at the Teheran Conference (November 30, 1943); in The Second World War, Volume V : Closing the Ring (1952), Chapter 21 (Teheran: The Crux), p. 338.

• The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: “China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it.” There’s another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modern—it dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: “The tail of China is large and will not be wagged.” I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honour to be addressing you at this moment.
  • Address to a joint session of Congress, Washington, D.C. (January 17, 1952); reported in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (1974), vol. 8, p. 8326.

• But now let me return to my theme of the many changes that have taken place since I was last here. There is a jocular saying: ‘To improve is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often.’ I had to use that once or twice in my long career.
  • Address to a joint session of Congress, Washington, D.C., (17 January 1952) “We Must Not Lose Hope”, in The Great Republic : A History of America (2000), Churchill, Random House, p. 399 ISBN 0375754407

• …to-morrow the proclamation of her sovereignty will command the loyalty of her native land and of all other parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire. I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian Era, may well feel a thrill in invoking, once more, the prayer and the Anthem, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.
  • Broadcast (7 February 1952) upon the accession of Elizabeth II, quoted in Winston Churchill, Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (London: Cassell & Co, 1953), p. 240

• I am against the monopoly enjoyed by the BBC. For eleven years they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views which have proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical. They are honeycombed with Socialists—probably with Communists.
  • Quoted in Charles Moran’s diary entry (3 June 1952), quoted in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 416.

• Last week I watched the Trooping the Colour and our young Queen riding at the head of her Guards. … Certainly no one of British race could contemplate such a spectacle without pride. But no thinking man or woman could escape the terrible question: on what does it all stand? It does indeed seem hard that the traditions and triumphs of a thousand years should be challenged by the ebb and flow of markets and commercial and financial transactions…and that we have to watch from month to month the narrow margins upon which our solvency and consequently our reputation and influence depend. But fifty million islanders growing food for only thirty millions, and dependent for the rest upon their exertions, their skill and their genius, present a problem which has not been seen or at least recorded before. In all history there has never been a community so large, so complex, so sure of its way of life, posed at such dizzy eminence and on so precarious a foundation.
  • Speech at the Savoy Hotel, London (11 June 1952), quoted in Winston Churchill, Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (London: Cassell & Co, 1953), pp. 298-299

• Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught, but I shall not attempt to foreshadow the proposals which will be brought before the House tomorrow. Today it will be sufficient and appropriate to deal with the obvious difficulties and confusion of the situation as we found it on taking office.
  • In debate in the House of Commons, 4 Nov 1952

• A number of social problems arose. I had been told that neither smoking nor alcoholic beverages were allowed in the [Saudi] Royal Presence. As I was the host at luncheon I raised the matter at once, and said to the interpreter that if it was the religion of His Majesty [Ibn Saud] to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them. The King graciously accepted the position. His own cup-bearer from Mecca offered me a glass of water from its sacred well, the most delicious I had ever tasted.
  • Discussion of an audience with Saudi King Ibn Saud at the Fayoum oasis, Egypt, on February 17, 1945; in The Second World War, Volume VI : Triumph and Tragedy (1953), Chapter 23 (Yalta: Finale), pp. 348-349.

• By noon it was clear that the Socialists would have a majority. At luncheon my wife said to me, ‘It may well be a blessing in disguise.’ I replied, ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’
  • On the (July 26, 1945) landslide electoral defeat that turned him out of office near the end of WWII, in The Second World War, Volume VI : Triumph and Tragedy (1953), Chapter 40 (The End of My Account), p. 583.

• Nicholas Soames: “Is it true, grandpapa, that you are the greatest man in the world?” Churchill: “Yes I am. Now bugger off.”^[10]

• Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
  • From a speech given at the Royal Academy of Art in 1953; quoted in Time magazine (11 May 1954).

• To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
  • Remarks at a White House luncheon (26 June 1954)
  • Quoted in “Churchill Urges Patience in Coping with Red Dangers”. The New York Times. June 27, 1954.
  • Has been falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck.
  • But Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, speaking of this quote, noted that Churchill actually said, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Four years later, during a visit to Australia, Harold Macmillan said the words usually—and wrongly—attributed to Churchill: “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” Credit: Harold Macmillan.^[11]

• If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, ‘How shocking!’
  • Remarks to the National Press Club, Washington (28 June 1954)^[12]

• I read with great interest all that you have written me about what is called Colonialism, namely: bringing forward backward races and opening up the jungles. I was brought up to feel proud of much that we had done. Certainly in India, with all its history, religion and ancient forms of despotic rule, Britain has a story to tell which will look quite well against the background of the coming hundred years. … I am sceptical about universal suffrage for the Hottentots even if refined by proportional representation. The British and American Democracies were slowly and painfully forged and even they are not perfect yet.
  • Letter to President Eisenhower (8 August 1954), quoted in Martin Gilbert, ‘Never Despair’: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1040-1041. Cf. Lord Salisbury: “You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots”.

• We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find the harbour of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.
  • At Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, Canada, November 9, 1954 ; as cited at The Churchill Centre.

• I have lived my life in the House of Commons, having served there for 52 out of the last 54 years of this tumultuous and convulsive century. I have indeed seen all the ups and downs of fate and fortune there, but I have never ceased to love and honour the Mother of Parliaments, the model of the legislative assemblies of so many lands.
  • Speech in Westminster Hall (30 November 1954) for his eightieth birthday, quoted in The Times (1 December 1954), p. 11

• I was very glad when Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the late war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. I have never accepted what many people have kindly said—namely, that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and it proved unconquerable. It fell to me to express it and if I found the right word you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen, and by my tongue.
  • Speech in Westminster Hall (30 November 1954), quoted in The Times (1 December 1954), p. 11

• It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
  • Speech in Westminster Hall (30 November 1954), quoted in The Times (1 December 1954), p. 11

• An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last.
  • In Reader’s Digest (December 1954).

• “Keep England White” is a good slogan.
  • On Commonwealth immigration, recorded in Harold Macmillan’s diary entry (20 January 1955), quoted in Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years, 1950-57 (Macmillan, 2003), p. 382

• I have worked very hard with Nehru. I told him he should be the light of Asia, to show all those mil­lions how they can shine out, instead of accept­ing the dark­ness of Com­mu­nism.
  • 18 Feb­ru­ary 1955, WSC to Eden’s pri­vate sec­re­tary Eve­lyn Shuckburgh.

• There is widespread belief throughout the free world that, but for American nuclear superiority, Europe would already have been reduced to satellite status and the Iron Curtain would have reached the Atlantic and the Channel. Unless a trustworthy and universal agreement upon disarmament, conventional and nuclear alike, can be reached and an effective system of inspection is established and is actually working, there is only one sane policy for the free world in the next few years. That is what we call defence through deterrents. This we have already adopted and proclaimed. These deterrents may at any time become the parents of disarmament, provided that they deter. To make our contribution to the deterrent we must ourselves possess the most up-to-date nuclear weapons, and the means of delivering them.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (1 March 1955)

• I have a strong admiration for the Russian people—for their bravery, their many gifts, and their kindly nature. It is the Communist dictatorship and the declared ambition of the Communist Party and their proselytising activities that we are bound to resist, and that is what makes this great world cleavage.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (1 March 1955)

• Hitherto, crowded countries…like the United Kingdom and Western Europe, have had this outstanding vulnerability to carry. But the hydrogen bomb, with its vast range of destruction and the even wider area of contamination, would be effective also against nations whose population hitherto has been so widely dispersed over large land areas as to make them feel that they were not in any danger at all. They, too, become highly vulnerable … Here again we see the value of deterrents, immune against surprise and well understood by all persons on both sides—I repeat “on both sides”—who have the power to control events. That is why I have hoped for a long time for a top level conference where these matters could be put plainly and bluntly from one friendly visitor to the conference to another. Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (1 March 1955)

• The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (1 March 1955)

• I think it is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice.
  • To Sir Ian Gilmour on Commonwealth immigration to England in 1955, quoted in Ian Gilmour, Inside Right (Hutchinson, 1977), p. 134

• It remains for me to wish my colleagues all good fortune in the difficult, but hopeful, situation which you have to face. I trust that you will be enabled to further the progress already made in rebuilding the domestic stability and economic strength of the United Kingdom and in weaving still more closely the threads which bind together the countries of the Commonwealth or, as I still prefer to call it, the Empire.
  • Speech to his last Cabinet (5 April 1955), quoted in Henry Pelling, Churchill’s Peacetime Ministry, 1951–55 (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 175

• No, no. I stop in Victoria’s reign. I could not write about the woe and ruin of the terrible twentieth century. We answered all the tests. But it was useless.
  • His answer to Charles Moran, who asked him whether he would write about the 20th century in his A History of the English Speaking Peoples (19 June 1956), quoted in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 732

• We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm.
  • As quoted by Violet Bonham-Carter in Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), according to The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 155 ISBN 0300107986

• I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
  • As cited in The Forbes Book of Business Quotations (2007), Ed. Goodwin, Black Dog Publishing, p. 49, ISBN 1579127215

• It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.
  • As cited in The Forbes Book of Business Quotations (2007), Ed. Goodwin, Black Dog Publishing, p. 168, ISBN 1579127215

• I am a sporting man. I always give them a fair chance to get away.
  • Asked why he missed so many trains and aeroplanes, as cited in My Darling Clementine (1963), Fishman, W.H. Allen : Star Books edition (1974), p. 218 ISBN 0352300191

• We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
  • Quoted in Words of Wisdom: Winston Churchill, Students’ Academy, Lulu Press (2014), Section Three : ISBN 1312396598

• In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.
  • Quoted by Lord Normanbrook in Action This Day: Working With Churchill. Memoirs by Lord Norman Brook (And Others) (1968)
  • Often misquoted as: Eating my words has never given me indigestion.[7].

• Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.
  • Quoted by Robert Boothby in Robert Boothy, Recollections of a Rebel (London: Hutchison, 1978), pp. 183–84.

• Take away that pudding – it has no theme.
  • As cited in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject (2010), ed. Susan Ratcliffe, Oxford University Press, p. 193 : ISBN 0199567069 ; reported in The Way the Wind Blows (1976), Lord Home, Quadrangle, p. 217.

• [Magna Carta provided] “a system of checks and balances which would accord the monarchy its necessary strength, but would prevent its perversion by a tyrant or a fool.”
  • Magna Carta and Man’s Quest for Freedom, JW.org

• This Treasury paper, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
  • As cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 50, ISBN 1586486389

• I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.
  • As cited in Churchill By Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 128 ISBN 1586486381

• My ability to persuade my wife to marry me [was] quite my most brilliant achievement … Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one’s better half.
  • As cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 511, ISBN 1586489577

• Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
  • As quoted in the United States of America Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 105th Congress Second Session, Government Printing Office, Vol. 144, Part 4, p. 5738

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

A History of the English Speaking Peoples, in four volumes, much of which had been written in the 1930s. ISBN 0-88029-423-X

• Thus ended the great American Civil War, which upon the whole must be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.

• No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.
  • Vol I; The Birth of Britain

• At this point the march of invention brought a new factor upon the scene. Iron was dug and forged. Men armed with iron entered Britain from the Continent and killed the men of bronze. At this point we can plainly recognise across the vanished millenniums a fellow-being. A biped capable of slaying another with iron is evidently to modern eyes a man and a brother.
  • On the end of the Bronze Age and start of the Iron Age, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprising of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
  • On the sack of Verulamium (St. Albans) by Queen Boadicea

• Apparently, as in so many ancient battles, the beaten side were the victims of misunderstanding and the fate of the day was decided against them before the bulk of the forces realised that a serious engagement had begun. Reserves descended from the hills too late to achieve victory, but in good time to be massacred in the rout.
  • On the Battle of Mons Graupius, which ended British resistance to Roman rule, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.
• The cities are everywhere in decline. Trade, industry and agriculture bend under the weight of taxation.
• The contrast between the morals at the centre of power and those practiced by wide communities in many subject lands presented problems of ever growing unrest.
  • On the last years of Rome and Roman Britain; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round. Let us then declare that King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour, slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.
  • On King Arthur Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• The picture rises before us vivid and bright: the finely carved, dragon-shaped prow; the high, curving stern; the long row of shields, black and yellow alternately, ranged along the sides; the gleam of steel; the scent of murder.
  • On the Viking Long Ships, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• When we reflect upon the brutal vices of these salt-water bandits, pirates as shameful as any whom the sea has borne, or recoil from their villainous destruction and cruel deeds, we must also remember the discipline, the fortitude, the comradeship and martial virtues which made them at this period beyond all challenge the most formidable and daring race in the world.
  • On The Vikings, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• When the next year the raiders returned and landed near Jarrow they were stoutly attacked while harassed by bad weather. Many were killed. Their “king” was captured and put to a cruel death, and the fugitives carried so grim a tale back to Denmark that for forty years the English coasts were unravaged.
  • On a Viking Raid in 794 A.D.; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• “872, Ivar, King of the Northmen of all Ireland and Britain, ended his life.” He had conquered Mercia and East Anglia. He had captured the major stronghold of the kingdom of Strathclyde, Dumbarton. Laden with loot and seemingly invincible, he settled in Dublin and died there peacefully two years later. The pious chroniclers report that he “slept in Christ.” Thus it may be that he had the best of both worlds.
  • On Ivar, a Viking King (c. 872); Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• A group of pagan ruffians and pirates had gained possession of an effective military and naval machine, but they faced a mass of formidable veterans whom they had to feed and manage, and for whom they must provide killings. Such men make plans, and certainly their descent upon England was one of the most carefully considered and elaborately prepared villainies of that dark time.
  • On the Danish invasion of England in 892; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• Without any coherent national organisation to repel from the land on which they had settled the ever-unknowable descents from the seas, the Saxons, now for four centuries entitled to be deemed the owners of the soil, very nearly succumbed completely to the Danish inroads. That they did not was due–as almost every critical turn of historic fortune has been due–to the sudden apparition in an era of confusion and decay of one of the great figures of history.
  • On King Alfred the Great; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• It was Twelfth Night, and the Saxons, who in these days of torment refreshed and fortified themselves by celebrating the feasts of the Church, were off their guard, engaged in pious exercises, or perhaps even drunk. Down swept the ravaging foe. The whole army of Wessex, sole guarantee of England south of the Thames, was dashed into confusion. Many were killed.
  • On King Alfred’s defeat by the Danes in January, w:878; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• Civilisation had been restored to the Island. But now the political fabric which nurtured it was about to be overthrown. Hitherto strong men armed had kept the house. Now a child, a weakling, a vacillator, a faithless, feckless creature, succeeded to the warrior throne.
  • On Ethelred the Unready; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• We have seen that Alfred in his day had never hesitated to use money as well as arms. Ethelred used money instead of arms. He used it in ever-increasing quantities, with ever-diminishing returns … There is the record of a final payment to the Vikings in 1012. This time forty-eight thousand pounds’ weight of silver was extracted, and the oppressors enforce the collection by the sack of Canterbury, holding Archbishop Alphege to ransom, and finally killing him at Greenwich because he refused to coerce his flock to raise the money. The Chronicle states: “All these calamities fell upon us through evil counsel, because tribute was not offered to them at the right time, nor yet were they resisted; but, when they had done the most evil, then was peace made with them. And notwithstanding all this peace and tribute they went everywhere in companies, harried our wretched people, and slew them”
  • On Ethelred the Unready’s policy; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• It is vain to recount further the catalogue of miseries. In earlier ages such horrors remain unknown because unrecorded. Just enough flickering light plays upon this infernal scene to give us the sense of its utter desolation and hopeless wretchedness and cruelty.
  • On a series of Viking raids; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• The lights of Saxon England were going out, and in the gathering darkness a gentle, grey-beard prophet foretold the end. When on his death-bed Edward spoke of a time of evil that was coming upon the land his inspired mutterings struck terror into the hearers.
  • On the death of King Edward the Confessor in January, 1066, months before the Norman Invasion; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• On September 28 the fleet hove in sight, and all came safely to anchor in Pevensey Bay. There was no opposition to the landing. The local “fyrd” had been called out this year four times already to watch the coast, and having, in true English style, come to the conclusion that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived had gone back to their homes.
  • On the landing of William the Conqueror at Pevensey; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
• Someone once said that history is written by the victors. He probably was not the greatest of all victors, if only because his name has been utterly forgotten.
  • On the Norman conquest of England; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right-eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided.
  • On the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.

• Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang.
  • On Saint Joan of Arc; Vol I: The Birth of Britain, p. 422

• Time after time, history ran over the luddites and romanticists, those who sought to restore the old and delay the new. And every time, history did it with faster, more reliable and more advanced vehicles.
  • On the Luddites ; Vol II: The New World, p. 121

• By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds. ‘Hell or Connaught’ were the terms he thrust upon the native inhabitants, and they for their part, across three hundred years, have used as their keenest expression of hatred ‘The Curse of Cromwell on you.’ … Upon all of us there still lies ‘the curse of Cromwell’.
  • On Oliver Cromwell’s policies in Ireland ; Vol II: The New World, p. 232