Churchill Quotes

“The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,’ she told him, ‘and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“When you make some great mistake,’ he philosophized, ‘it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which tamely surrendered were finished.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Churchill loathed Communism because of the attack it made ‘on the human spirit and human rights’, he said in July 1920. ‘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 practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Yet in all the anxiety of these days Churchill never lost his sense of humour. When an MP asked him on 8 June to ensure that the same mistakes over reparations were not made after victory that had been made after the Great War, the Prime Minister assured him that ‘That is most fully in our minds. I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated. We shall probably make another set of mistakes.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“When Churchill was twenty, the British Empire covered more than one-fifth of the earth’s land surface,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Churchill, Perth,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Only one thing in history is certain: that Mankind is unteachable.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“This was a time when it was equally good to live or die. Churchill, Their Finest Hour”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“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.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“In April, Churchill decided he should try to alter his speaking style, to make it less sonorous and Victorian, to avoid sounding pompous to younger listeners. At sixty, he was an old dog to be learning new oratorical tricks,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ he said in a debate in October. ‘The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“What is money made for except to spend?”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The greatest tie of all is language . . . Words are the only things that last forever. The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of time. The Pyramids moulder, the bridges rust, the canals fill up, grass covers the railway track; but words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but with all their pristine vital force.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“If an English writer cannot say what he has to say in English, and in simple English, depend upon it, it is probably not worth saying”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Continuing high unemployment, the legacy of the General Strike and the Trade Disputes Act, and a long period in power had weakened the Baldwin Government, for which Churchill had some responsibility. Yet once more he was fortunate in his defeat: he would not have wanted to be chancellor of the Exchequer during the Wall Street Crash later that year.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire,’ proclaimed Churchill defending the partisanship of the British Gazette in a Commons debate on the Strike on 7 July. ‘When you are in a great difficulty and in a fight of this kind, however unfortunate it may be, it is absolutely no use people pretending they do not know what side they are on.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“In the Second World War his bulldog obstinacy proved invaluable; during the Gallipoli campaign it left him appallingly vulnerable.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“It was felt that to admit defeat at the hands of a Muslim power would weaken the British Empire, which ruled over tens of millions of Muslims – and in India particularly prestige was more important than sheer military power.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords,’ he said. ‘It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“There is no end to the grotesque absurdities that would follow the passing of this measure. It would be possible for women to have a vote while living in a state of prostitution; if she married and became an honest woman she would lose that vote, but she could regain it through divorce.’25 A regular criticism of Churchill was that, as Asquith put it to his close friend Venetia Stanley,* ‘Winston thinks with his mouth,’ meaning that he adopted policies because they sounded good in speeches.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The greatest tie of all is language . . . Words are the only things that last forever. The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of time. The Pyramids moulder, the bridges rust, the canals fill up, grass covers the railway track; but words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but with all their pristine vital force.’204”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,’ he later wrote in The World Crisis; ‘the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’45”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“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 civilization 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.27 In 1908 and 1909 over 180,000 people were in prison in Britain, around half for failure to pay a fine on time.28 Churchill argued that more time should be allowed for payment, since the best principle for a prison system should be to ‘prevent as many people as possible from getting there’.29 He set in motion processes by which the number of people imprisoned for failing to pay a fine for drunkenness was reduced from 62,000 to 1,600 over the next decade.30 Churchill also searched for alternative punishments for petty offences, especially by children, as he saw prison as a place of last resort for serious offenders.31 When he visited Pentonville Prison in October, he released youths imprisoned for minor offences and although he was not at the Home Office long enough to reform the penal system as a whole, he reduced the sentences of nearly 400 individuals.32 He also introduced music and libraries into prisons, tried to improve the conditions of suffragettes imprisoned for disturbing the peace and reduced the maximum amount”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away – you may put money in the pocket 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.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny