Churchill's Shadow Quotes

“Not long before her death, Mary Soames, Churchill’s last surviving child, said about her father, ‘The thing to remember is that he was a journalist.’ So he was, and in his double career as politician and journalist, the writing enriched him, with earnings far larger than even the prime minister’s salary, while also tempting him to play his habitual role as a lone wolf, free of party loyalty.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopœia. I yield to no one in my detestation of Bolshevism, and of the revolutionary violence which precedes it … But 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.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Treaty and the reparations Germany was obliged to pay were ‘malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile’. This was the theme of the young economist Maynard Keynes in his philippic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which began a myth which has never died. In reality, the real disaster wasn’t the way the war had begun or who was responsible, but how it had ended; not the claim that Germany had started the war, but the Germans’ belief that they hadn’t lost it, a belief encouraged by both German generals and politicians. When returning troops marched through Berlin in December, they were told, by Ebert of all people, the Social Democratic leader, ‘No army has overcome you.’ With that belief implanted, when the Treaty was published it was easy for demagogues to offer an answer. If the army had been ‘im Feld unbesiegt’, undefeated in battle, it must have been betrayed by the ‘November criminals’, the treacherous politicians who had taken over, and then betrayed Germany, and then ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilians, and Jews. Thus was the seed planted that would bring forth a frightful blossom.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Posterity may judge Churchill less harshly. If he thought that Russian Communism represented an awful regression into barbarism, he was quite right. Generations of starry-eyed enthusiasts in the West would be enchanted by the Soviet myth, and then disenchanted because they had learned what ‘we never knew’, when in fact everything could be known from the start. There was, after all, no mystery.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“If Churchill had looked harder, he would have seen that England’s ‘highest position’ was very tenuous. Apart from her dead sons, the balance of events had swung heavily against her. Not least, his country was hugely in debt. By 1917, the British were paying most of the cost of the war not only for themselves but for their allies: half of Belgian and Serbian, two-thirds of French and Russian, and all of Italian war expenditure was funded by London. In return, London depended more and more on the money loaned by Washington and Wall Street, in particular the great bank of J.P. Morgan, and victory found the British in the excruciating position of having to repay the immense debts they owed, with little hope of recovering the debts owed them, or in the Russian case no hope at all.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“It was also opposed by a Tory. Curzon reminded his colleagues that the British Empire was ‘the greatest Mahometan power on earth’, and was dismayed at the effect the Declaration would have on those hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects of the Crown. He presciently asked how it was proposed ‘to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman inhabitants and introduce the Jews in their place’, and he foresaw that the Arabs would not be happy ‘either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water’. As to the Jews themselves, Curzon told Montagu, ‘I cannot conceive a worse bondage to which to relegate an advanced and intellectual community than to exile in Palestine.’ Churchill was also conscious of the many ‘Mahometan’ subjects of the empire, but disdainful of them, and he was completely indifferent to the wishes or interests of the Palestinian Arabs.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“But the Declaration was bitterly opposed by another Liberal. Edwin Montagu was the only Jewish member of the Cabinet and, like many assimilated Jews at the time, was appalled by the very idea of Zionism and a Jewish state, which seemed to brand him an alien in his own country.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Winston Churchill was twenty when his father died. Lord Randolph had lived to see his son grow up, and to be bitterly disappointed by him, a disappointment he never disguised. Both parents treated their son appallingly. They were both, in different but odious ways, wholly absorbed in themselves and their own lives, Lord Randolph with politics and finance, Jennie with luncheons and lovers. They rarely visited him at his schools or even wrote to him, leaving him to find what emotional support he could from his nanny, Mrs Everest; a neglect which had curious results.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos’, which seemed to Churchill to embody his idea extremely well: ‘Spare the conquered and wear down the proud.’ And Churchill went on to say that this had been his principle throughout: ‘I thought we ought to have conquered the Irish and then given them Home Rule; that we ought to have starved out the Germans, and then revictualled their country; and that after smashing the General Strike, we should have met the grievances of the miners. I always get into trouble because so few people take this line. I was once asked to devise an inscription for a monument in France. I wrote, “In war, Resolution. In defeat, Defiance. In victory, Magnanimity. In peace, Goodwill.”’ Whether or not that”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Churchill himself would later, if privately, say that returning to gold was the worst mistake of his life, a high standard indeed.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“His most momentous decision at the Treasury was to return to the Gold Standard. He had gathered four economic and financial authorities to argue it out, two for gold, two against. Keynes was one of the opponents; he called the gold standard ‘a barbarous relic’, although he would help create something remarkably similar to a gold standard at the end of the next war, when he was one of the architects of the new financial order which served the western world so well through three decades of unexampled prosperity. Churchill nevertheless took the plunge.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Even so, Churchill’s path was well-nigh unique in deserting one party for another and then deserting back again.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“No less enthusiastically, Churchill saw that air power ‘may ultimately lead to a form of control over semi-civilised countries which will be found very effective and infinitely cheaper’, adding that, ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Much of this was Churchill’s handiwork, confirmed in March 1921 at a conference in Cairo to decide the immediate future of these lands which had just been added, albeit somewhat ambiguously, to the British Empire. Thither the Colonial Secretary went, accompanied by Clementine and her maid. Churchill could claim responsibility for cobbling together the disparate territory of Iraq, extending from Kurdish lands in the north to Marsh Arabs in the south, a completely artificial country whose predominantly Shia Muslim populace was placed under a Sunni dynasty; a piece of statecraft much later described in a book with the succinct title Winston’s Folly.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Texan bluntness by Lyndon Johnson: with a certain kind of man, you’d rather have him ‘on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Whatever it did to Churchill, Gallipoli saw the birth of a nation, or rather two. By no remote consequence of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal would become Kemal Ataturk, while the rump of the Ottoman Empire became a Turkish national state under his leadership. And Australia would change also. The headstone of one Australian infantryman bears the words, chosen by his parents, ‘When day break, duty done for King and Country,’ but that was not how later generations of Australians would feel. ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget’ was the quaint slogan advertising the 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli, which helped launch Mel Gibson’s career, but every Australian has heard of it.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“right: profound un-understanding of others persisted throughout Churchill’s life. Hindered by that obtusity, he had discovered the extreme vulnerability of his own position, and the harsh reality of politics. The truth was painfully simple: he had too many enemies, too few friends, and almost no popular support.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Although Churchill hadn’t been the only sponsor of the doomed Gallipoli enterprise, he had played a leading role, and not even an honest one at times. In any case, the old saying goes that success has many parents but failure is an orphan, and Gallipoli had become a one-parent child.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“his removal was universally welcomed in the navy, not least by that old salt, George V. The formation of the new government was most desirable, since ‘Only by that means can we get rid of Churchill from Admiralty,’ the king told the queen. ‘He is the real danger’ and ‘has become impossible’.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Churchill that he had a great many military ideas, most of them likewise bad.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Churchill had always had a strong sense of personal destiny: ‘Why have I always been kept safe within a hair’s breadth of death, except to do something like this?’ Now he felt that more than ever that, even if war was folly and barbarism, it was his fulfilment – and opportunity.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“And while he protested that he was more than just a soldier, Churchill recognised in himself an obsession with war, along with a contradictory fear of that obsession. ‘Much as war attracts me,’ he had written to Clementine from the German army manoeuvres in 1909, ‘& fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year … what vile & wicked folly and barbarism it is”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.’ Penetrating words, and he had no idea just how horribly true they would prove over the next fifty years.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“He soon made himself deeply disliked by many naval officers by his energetic reforming and general meddling, although this was largely to his credit. He wanted to improve the conditions of ordinary seamen, and to increase their pay for the first time since the early days of Victoria’s reign, and at the other end he created a naval staff. ‘I knew thoroughly the current”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“When the last Allied soldiers were evacuated from Gallipoli in early 1916, more than 34,000 British dead were left behind, as well as nearly 10,000 from Australia and almost 3000 from New Zealand, nearly 10,000 French and French colonial troops who are often forgotten, and some 1400 Indians who always are. They weren’t the only casualties of the most controversial campaign of the Great War. Left behind also were Churchill’s reputation and career. How had it come to this?”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“This was ‘a very terrible danger to the race’, he told Asquith in December 1910, and he advocated a policy of compulsory sterilisation to purify that ‘race’, with 100,000 to start with. Thirty years later Churchill would imperishably say that, were the Third Reich to triumph, the whole world, ‘will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’. Here was one awful historical irony: the perverted science of National Socialism, beginning with sterilisation and proceeding to extermination, was what Churchill himself had once favoured, taken to a hideous conclusion.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“When Curzon was rash enough to say that ‘all civilisation has been the work of aristocracies’, Churchill retorted, ‘The upkeep of aristocracies has been the hard work of all civilisations”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“But the new century brought a ‘New Liberalism’, which saw social improvement as something which the state should deliberately direct. The President of the Board of Trade took this up with the zeal of a convert, proposing a minimum wage, creating labour exchanges to find work for the unemployed, suppressing ‘sweat shops’ – small garment factories where men, and often women, many of them immigrants, worked very long hours for very low wages – and then helping Lloyd George, who had been promoted as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to introduce National Insurance and an old age pension.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“The harshest verdict on the biography came from the White House. ‘I dislike the father and dislike the son,’ said President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Randolph and Winston possessed ‘such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants’, thought ‘TR’, and Winston’s book was ‘A clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar life of that clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar egoist.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

“Unusually among European languages, English has distinct words for ‘story’ and ‘history’ rather than the same word for both: ‘Was für eine Geschichte!’ means ‘What a story!’ rather than ‘an excellent history book’, and une histoire can be tittle-tattle in the street as well as a work of historical scholarship. For Winston Churchill, there was never any distinction.”
― Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill