Franklin and Winston Quotes

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“The service--a moved Roosevelt called it the "keynote" of his meeting with Churchill--was working a kind of magic, which is one of the points of liturgy and theater: to use the dramatic to convince people of a reality they cannot see.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“At seventy-five, Churchill said: “I am prepared to meet my Maker. But whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“With a chuckle, Churchill had replied: “Neither look for nor expect gratitude but rather get whatever comfort you can out of the belief that your effort is constructive in purpose.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“Dwight Eisenhower, who watched Churchill at work in operational planning. “Completely devoted to winning the war and discharging his responsibility as Prime Minister of Great Britain, he was difficult indeed to combat when conviction compelled disagreement with his views. . . . He could become intensely oratorical, even in discussion with a single person, but at the same time his intensity of purpose made his delivery seem natural and appropriate. He used humor and pathos with equal facility, and drew on everything from the Greek classics to Donald Duck for quotation, cliché and forceful slang to support his position.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“It is easy for you and for me to shrug our shoulders and say that conflicts taking place thousands of miles from the continental United States, and, indeed thousands of miles from the whole American hemisphere, do not seriously affect the Americas—and that all the United States has to do is to ignore them and go about its own business,” Roosevelt told the country from the White House on Sunday, September 3, 1939. “Passionately though we may desire detachment, we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought, does affect the American future.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same . . .”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“People respect candor if they are confident their leaders have a plan for moving forward.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“The Meaning of Democracy.” The request got White thinking. “Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.” “I love it!” Roosevelt said when he read the piece, which he would later quote, adding happily: “Them’s my sentiments exactly.” They were Churchill’s, too, though he would have phrased the point in a more ornate way. The Americans and the British, he said at Fulton in 1946, “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”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away,”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“But they always stayed in the arena, grappling with each other and with Stalin to find a way to win. Had they failed, or truly fallen out with each other, we could be living in a different world.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“The United States, therefore, is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines, through Lend Lease, we would lose this war.” True enough, but without Churchill, much of Europe might have been lost to Hitler before Roosevelt and Stalin were in the fight at all.”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“baize”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

“his other hand. Sensitive to his guest’s affliction, Churchill realized that “every step” was”
― Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship