The Last Lion Quotes

“It is the definition of an egoist that whatever occupies his attention is, for that reason, important.”
― William Raymond Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”
― William R. Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged.”
― William Raymond Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary; it fulfils the same function as pain in the human body, it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things.”
― William R. Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“Later he would say that writing a book “is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously re-worded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The Prime Minister scrawled across the page, "This is nonsense up with which I will not put.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“Biographer diagnoses reaction to restriction as a tell of true character. Some use even prison as a time of reflection and planning. Others, like Churchill, quickly chafe at missing interaction and opportunity.”
― William Raymond Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their oppressed neighbors across the Irish sea. The other -- small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources -- supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and afflicted with an extraordinary incidence of alcoholism. "It is a very moist climate," Churchill once observed. Yet endowed with immense charm, romantic vision, and remarkable genius, it was the homeland of Swift, Shore, Yeats, Joyce, Millington Synge, O'Casey, O'Faolain, and Dublin's Abbey Theater.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume I: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“His idea of a good dinner, he said, was to dine well and then "to discuss a good topic- with myself as the chief conversationalist." After one meal his son, Randolph was trying to make a point. Churchill broke in with a comment of his own. Randolph tried to pick up the thread of his argument. His father barked: "Don't interrupt me when I am interrupting!”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“He believed that of all languages English was was incomparably superior. On his tongue it was.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“He loved books and wrote of them: "if you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle or, as it were, fondle them: peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what it is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends. Let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“I like to live in the past. I don't think people are going to get much fun in the future”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“GBS wired Winston: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Churchill wired back: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”61”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it… the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts…. It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be swiftly followed by the lightening bolt of effect.”
― William Raymond Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“Deep insight, not stability, was his forte.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“They were the first men to be exposed to poison gas, massed machine-gun fire, and strafing airplanes, and lived with rats and lice, amid the stench of urine, feces, and decaying flesh, staring up at the sky by day and venturing out only by night. Separated by the junk of no-man's-land, the great, impotent armies squatted month after month, living troglodytic lives in candle-lit dugouts and trenches hewn from Fricourt chalk or La Bassee clay, or ladled from the porridge of swampy Flanders.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“When I finally decided to come in," he [John Fisher, First Sea Lord] later testified. "I went the whole hog. Totus porkus.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“Winston in his own words found himself in an "Alice in Wonderland world at the portals of which stood a quadratic equation followed by the dim chambers inhabited by the differential calculus, and then a strange corridor of sines and cosines in a highly square rooted condition.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill [#1]: Visions of Glory, 1874 - 1932

“The key to successful extramarital sex, therefore, was discretion. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, perhaps the most outspoken woman in polite society, said dryly: “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”43”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“read three or four books at a time to avoid tedium”—and”
― William R. Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“I am afraid only of people who cannot think.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion Winston Spencer Churchill 1874 Visions of Glory 1932

“During World War II he remarked that one of the greatest ordeals of the French resistance was hearing him address them in their own tongue over the BBC.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion : Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with that man. And concluded, 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.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion : Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“Nietzsche had warned against staring too long into an abyss because eventually, he said, it would stare back. Ireland was England’s abyss and it never blinked.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“If it is difficult to accept Churchill as a grandfather of the welfare state, it is even harder to picture him fighting plans to arm England against saber-rattling Germans.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“Today’s Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after mid-century, when the communications revolution led to expectations of instantaneity, are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the lightning of cause will be swiftly followed by the thunderclap of effect.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

“Now at last, at last, his hour had struck. He had been waiting in Parliament for forty years, had grown bald and gray in his nation’s service, had endured slander and calumny only to be summoned when the situation seemed hopeless to everyone except him.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“He wanted to lower taxes on the poor and raise them on unearned income: “The process of the creation of new wealth is beneficial to the whole community. The process of squatting on old wealth though valuable is a far less lively agent.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

“The war had left 160,000 young English widows and 300,000 fatherless children. The flower of England’s youth, its university students and recent graduates, had joined Kitchener’s armies and crossed to France, most of them as infantry lieutenants. The number of those who fell is incalculable, but some figures are suggestive. In his mindless Passchendaele offensive, Haig lost 22,316 junior officers, compared to only 6,913 Germans of similar rank. We shall never know how many potential prime ministers, cabinet ministers, poets, scientists, physicians, lawyers, professors, and distinguished civil servants perished in the mud of France and Belgium, but the conclusion is inescapable: an entire generation had lost most of its ablest men.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932