The World Crisis, Volume IV Quotes

“The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“No more may Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon lead armies to victory, ride their horses on the field of battle sharing the perils of their soldiers and deciding the fate of empires by the resolves and gestures of a few intense hours. For the future they will sit surrounded by clerks in offices, as safe, as quiet and as dreary as Government departments, while the fighting men in scores of thousands are slaughtered or stifled over the telephone by machinery. We have seen the last of the great Commanders. Perhaps they were extinct before Armageddon began. Next time the competition may be to kill women and children, and the civil population generally, and victory will give herself in sorry nuptials to the diligent hero who organises it on the largest scale.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“It is not necessary here to examine the important moral and material contribution of the United States to the general victory. But in the Peace Conference—to European eyes—President Wilson sought to play a part out of all proportion to any stake which his country had contributed or intended to contribute to European affairs. Actuated by the noblest motives he went far beyond any commission which the American Senate or people were willing to accord him, and armed with this inflation of his own constitutional power he sought to bend the world—no doubt for its own good—to his personal views.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Some errors and imperfections arose inevitably from the haste and pressure under which the Covenant was prepared. Nevertheless the base of the new building was set upon the living rock; and the mighty foundation stone, shaped by the innumerable chisellings of merciful men the world over and swung into position by loyal and dexterous English pulleys, will bear for all time the legend: ‘Well and truly laid by Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America.’ Who can doubt that upon and around this granite block will ultimately be built a dwelling-place and palace to which ‘all the men in all the lands’ will sooner or later resort in sure trust?”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“The plain people were busy getting their daily bread. They had no time to listen to all the frantic pleadings and protests which arose. One tale was good until another was told, and probably both were untrue and certainly very difficult to understand.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“One has a right to stand on the bank; but if one has exercised the right for a prolonged and agonising period without even throwing a rope to a man struggling in the rapids, some allowance should be made for the swimmer who now clutches at this rock and now at that in rough or ungainly fashion. It is not open to the cool bystander, who afterwards becomes the loyal and ardent comrade and brave rescuer, to set himself up as an impartial judge of events which never would have occurred had he outstretched a helping hand in time.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“The differences in Europe between France and Germany seemed trivial, petty, easy to be adjusted by a little good sense and charity. But the differences between Democrat and Republican in the United States! Here were really grave quarrels. He could not understand why the French should not be more forgiving to their beaten enemy; nor why the American Republicans should not expect cold comfort from a Democratic Administration. His gaze was fixed with equal earnestness upon the destiny of mankind and the fortunes of his party candidates. Peace and goodwill among all nations abroad, but no truck with the Republican Party at home. That was his ticket and that was his ruin, and the ruin of much else as well.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“The French plan, however, did not at all commend itself to Mr. Wilson. It thrust on one side all the pictures of the peace conference which his ambition and imagination had painted. He did not wish to come to speedy terms with the European Allies; he did not wish to meet their leading men around a table; he saw himself for a prolonged period at the summit of the world, chastening the Allies, chastising the Germans and generally giving laws to mankind. He believed himself capable of appealing to peoples and parliaments over the heads of their own governments, and he had as we have seen already hinted a willingness to try.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“One sect alone made a momentary stand. The Anarchists, strong in the traditions of Bakunin, conceived themselves unapproachable in extremism. If the Bolsheviks would turn the world upside down, they would turn it inside out; if the Bolsheviks abolished right and wrong, they would abolish right and left. They therefore spoke with confidence and held their heads high. But their case had been carefully studied in advance by the new authorities. No time was wasted in argument. Both in Petrograd and in Moscow they were bombed in their headquarters and hunted down and shot with the utmost expedition.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“He is no Socialist who will not sacrifice his Fatherland for the triumph of the Social Revolution.’—LENIN.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Authority was dispersed; the world unshackled; the weak became the strong; the sheltered became the aggressive; the contrast between victors and vanquished tended continually to diminish. A vast fatigue dominated collective action. Though every subversive element endeavoured to assert itself, revolutionary rage like every other form of psychic energy burnt low. Through all its five acts the drama has run its course; the light of history is switched off, the world stage dims, the actors shrivel, the chorus sinks. The war of the giants has ended; the quarrels of the pygmies have begun.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“The Bolsheviks do not represent Russia, they represent an international conception of human affairs entirely foreign and indeed hostile to anything we know of civilisation;”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision. Ludendorff refers to it with bated breath. ... They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume IV: The Aftermath

“Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume IV: The Aftermath

“In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision. Ludendorff refers to it with bated breath. Full allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German war leaders were already committed. They were in the mood which had opened unlimited submarine warfare with the certainty of bringing the United States into the war against them. Upon the Western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offence at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the ‘Flammenwerfer.’ Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia. Lenin arrived at Petrograd on April 16. Who was this being in whom there resided these dire potentialities? Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time. He invented the Communist plan of campaign. He issued the orders, he prescribed the watchwords, he gave the signal and he led the attack.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume IV: The Aftermath

“In any quarrel among men, if one side proclaims its complete impotence of will and hand, there are no bounds to the evils that may ensue.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“All’s quiet along the Potomac to-night
Except now and then a stray picket Is shot, as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Hard as are the tests of battle, the armies of all nations have withstood them. But here was the long gnawing strain of suffering much and talking more, of having little and doing nothing.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“It is true Greek tragedy, with Chance as the ever ready hand-maid of Fate.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“we must observe the march of Facts. Over stony roads, through the defiles of thorny and rock-clad hills, across ochre deserts baking in the sun, the weary, sullen caravan of Facts kept pertinaciously jogging along.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“the Armenians were left to sit on the doorstep of the United States.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Statesmen in a crisis, like generals or admirals in war, have often to take fateful decisions without knowing a very large proportion of the essential facts. It is hard to do this, but anything is better than not taking decisions at all.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“a special police force was formed entirely of ex-officers and from the wartime armies. These special police, who ultimately amounted to 7,000 men, were nicknamed on account of their dark cap and khaki uniform the ‘Black and Tans.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Sinn Fein,’ ‘Ourselves alone,”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“The grass soon grows over a battlefield but never over a scaffold.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“No one expected a renewal of war in the lifetime of the generation that had known its horror and its squalors.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“The almost complete exclusion of religion in all its forms from the political sphere had left Nationalism the most powerful moulding instrument of mankind in temporal affairs.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4

“Here we stir the embers of the past and light the beacons of the future. Old flags are raised anew; the passions of vanished generations awake; beneath the shell-torn soil of the twentieth century the bones of long dead warriors and victims are exposed, and the wail of lost causes sounds in the wind.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 4