Winston's War Quotes

“Trying to maintain good relations814 with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“But it was a sad end to so much magnificent wartime statesmanship by the prime minister, that the lion should lie down with the bear, roll on his back and allow his chest to be tickled.”
― Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

“The misery of the whole world appals me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may rise out of those we are successfully ending.”
― Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

“Churchill wrote to Eden in the most explicit terms he used during the war about the nature of Nazi action against the Jews: ‘There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world…It is clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death.”
― Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

“Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.”
― Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

“Too many of Britain’s bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of questionable strategic value.”
― Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

“Both Britain’s most distinguished earlier war leaders, Pitt the Elder and Younger, were responsible for graver strategic follies than himself.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“From start to finish, he grasped the fact that the Anglo-Americans needed Russia’s vast human sacrifice more than Russia needed Western supplies.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“It is a mistake to try to write out1046 on some little pieces of papers what the vast emotions of an outraged and quivering world will be either immediately after the struggle is over or when the inevitable cold fit follows the hot. These awe-inspiring tides of feeling dominate most people’s minds … Guidance in these mundane matters is granted to us only step by step, or at the utmost a step or two ahead. There is therefore wisdom in reserving one’s decisions as long as possible and until all the facts and forces that will be potent at the moment are revealed.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“On December 24, a young French royalist burst into Darlan’s office at the Summer Palace and shot him dead. Responsibility for the assassination remains one of the last significant mysteries of the Second World War. The immediate perpetrator, one Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, was hurried before a firing squad two days later.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“Here was another manifestation of Churchill’s “three-inch pipe” theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“Bliss in that age was it to be alive.’ (He says) ‘Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“Winston”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“Fear not the result, for either thy end be a majestic and an enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War

“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.”
― Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

“His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilize Britain's warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British nation faced the world united and exalted. The "Dunkirk spirit" was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political political leadership for the rest of time.”
― Max Hastings, Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945