Churchill's Empire Quotes

“Churchill, Twain said, ‘knew all about war and nothing about peace’. Twain added that he himself disapproved of the war in South Africa, ‘and he thought England sinned when she interfered with the Boers, as the United States is sinning in meddling in the affairs of the Filipinos. England and America were kin in almost everything; now they are kin in sin.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“Churchill thought that it was ‘Crazy’ to give universal suffrage to ‘these naked savages’. Lyttelton hoped to ‘retard’ constitutional development in Nigeria and cited the principle of ‘divide et impera’.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“On racial issues, though, he made no effort to adjust to modernity.143 When asked if he had seen the film Carmen Jones, a musical with a black cast, he replied that he had walked out early on as he didn’t like ‘blackamoors’.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“In a 5 November leader article the West African Pilot vented its anger at Churchill’s words in the Commons: ‘That a British prime Minister could utter such a statement during an unparalleled destructive war which has cost Colonial peoples their material resources and manpower is, indeed, a revelation. What, now, must we expect our fate to be after the war?’120 Nnamdi ‘Zik’ Azikiwe, the editor of this pioneering Nigerian nationalist newspaper, also cabled Churchill requesting clarification of the discrepancy between Attlee’s statement and Churchill’s. Did the Charter apply to West Africa or not? Churchill gave instructions for a reply, which, echoing his Commons statement, claimed that the government’s Empire policy was ‘already entirely in harmony with the high conceptions of freedom and justice which inspired the joint declaration [i.e. the Atlantic Charter]’. Therefore, no fresh statement of policy on Africa was required.121 But his efforts were to no avail. In 1943 Zik travelled with a delegation to Britain and used the Charter as the basis for a demand for a timescale for complete independence.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“Oliver Cromwell’s words in dismissal of the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“the industrialist G. D. Birla, one of Gandhi’s big financial backers. (As someone once said, ‘it costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty’.)”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“In 1928 Birkenhead stood down from the Cabinet in order to earn the money needed to fund his lavish lifestyle.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“Birkenhead wrote privately that his ‘highest and most permanent hopes’ for the continuation of British rule rested on the permanency of the Hindu–Muslim divide.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“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 representative of the King-Emperor.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“In 1910, the Prime Minister moved Churchill to the Home Office, where he took a strong interest, shared by many other contemporaries, in the pseudo-science of eugenics. He believed that the mentally and physically defective should be sterilized, in part for national-imperial reasons. He told Asquith: ‘I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a very terrible danger to the race.’14”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“The democratic principles of Europe are by no means suited to the development of Asiatic and African people.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“Yet although he was undoubtedly sincere in his intention that all races should be treated with justice, that notion was perfectly consistent in his mind with the concept of white supremacy. For him, there was a duty incumbent on the superior British race to safeguard and improve lesser ones. That, indeed, was part of the justification for imperial rule.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“I have seen enough in peace and war of the frontiers of our Empire to know that the British dominion all over the world could not endure for a year, perhaps not for a month, if it was founded upon a material basis. The strength and splendour of our authority is derived not from physical forces, but from moral ascendancy, liberty, justice, English tolerance, and English honesty.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“the frontiers of our Empire to know that the British dominion all over the world could not endure for a year, perhaps not for a month, if it was founded upon a material basis. The strength and splendour of our authority is derived not from physical forces, but from moral ascendancy, liberty, justice, English tolerance, and English honesty.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“the early worm is likely to get caught.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“the tribesmen ‘surrendered some thousands of their rifles, most of them captured or stolen from us, and were [. . .] given umpteen heavy bags of silver to induce them to go on pretending they had been defeated’.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“it is impossible to cure a political prostitute from whoring’.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“Much had happened to Churchill in the interval between these two speeches. In January 1895 his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died at the age of forty-five from a degenerative illness, possibly syphilis,”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made

“At its zenith, around 500 million people, or about a quarter of the world’s population, were British subjects.”
― Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made