The Last Lion Quotes

“I have always held… that the skin of the bear must not be distributed until the bear has been killed.”
― Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

“In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in English Hours “persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.”
― Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

“His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but do not follow him”
― Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. —JOHN F. KENNEDY on Theodore Roosevelt New York City, December 5, 1961”
― William R. Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“In 1988, William Manchester began writing The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, the third and final volume of his biography of Winston Churchill.”
― Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

“I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“is equally true that throughout his life he retained the small boy’s glee in making mischief, in dressing up, in showing off. He was probably the only man in London who owned more hats than his wife—top hats, Stetsons, seamen’s caps, his hussar helmet, a privy councillor’s cocked hat, homburgs, an astrakhan, an Irish “paddy hat,” a white pith helmet, an Australian bush hat, a fez, the huge beplumed hat he wore as a Knight of the Garter, even the full headdress of a North American Indian chieftain. He had closets full of costumes.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future.”
― Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

“It is curious,” he observed, “how the English-speaking peoples have always had [a] fear of one-man power,” or “handing themselves over, lock, stock and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshipping him as if he were an”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?” Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome Memorized by Churchill at age thirteen”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. —Winston Churchill Speech in the House of Commons November 12, 1940”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“To BILL SHIRER who saw it from the other side and saw it first”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“slighted Churchill. “He’s like a weather-vane,” explained one. Another said: “His life is one long speech. He does not talk. He orates…. He does not want to hear your views. He does not want to disturb the beautiful clarity of his thoughts by the tiresome reminders of the other side.” Baldwin”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Churchill’s parliamentary career had come to resemble the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who was condemned to toil up a steep hill pushing a huge stone which, just before he reached the top, always rolled back to the bottom.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“He quoted Pope: “Sworn to no master, of no sect am I / As drives the storm, at any door I knock.”37”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Mark Twain, one of his boyhood heroes, inscribed a limited edition of his works for him, writing on the first flyleaf: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Winston remembered a quotation from Napoleon: “When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“It’s no use blowing the trumpet for the charge and then looking around to find nobody following.”112”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“The terrible machinery of scientific war had done its work. The Dervish host was scattered and destroyed. Their end, however, only anticipates that of the victors, for Time, which laughs at Science, as Science laughs at Valour, will in due course contemptuously brush both combatants away.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“someone else remarked to him that ethics dealt, not merely with what you ought to do, but with why it ought to be done,”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“The British soldier was given a small island for his birthplace and the whole world as his grave.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Depressives, more than most people, are dependent upon external sources of self-esteem.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“What a creature of strange moods he is,” Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, wrote, “always at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.” In times of disappointment, rejection, or bereavement, feelings of hopelessness overwhelmed him. Thoughts of self-destruction were never far away. He told his doctor: “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand 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.” He also disliked sleeping near a balcony. He explained: “I’ve no desire to quit this world, but thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into the head.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Depression is common among the great; it may balance their moods of omnipotence. Among its sufferers have been Goethe, Lincoln, Bismarck, Schumann, Tolstoy, Robert E. Lee, and Martin Luther.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“In a profound sense, he himself always remained the underdog. All his life he suffered spells of depression, sinking into the brooding depths of melancholia, an emotional state which, though little understood, resembles the passing sadness of the normal man as a malignancy resembles a canker sore. The depressive knows what Dante knew: that hell is an endless, hopeless conversation with oneself. Every day he chisels his way through time, praying for relief. The”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“He refused to negotiate until his adversary had capitulated. Revenge afterward, however, was to him unmanly and ungentlemanly.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965

“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965