Churchill Quotes

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“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 the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Painting As a Pastime

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
― Winston S Churchill

“This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors”
― WINSTON S CHURCHILL

“Safari, so goody.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said.

“Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“He looked confused. “With your girlfriend, I mean. Who was to blame?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Ultimately Churchill, I expect.”
― Timur Vermes, Er ist wieder da

“In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Mr. Roosevelt liked to be liked. He courted and wooed people. He had good taste, an affable disposition, and profound delight in people and human relationships. This was probably the single most revealing of all his characteristics; it was both a strength and a weakness, and is a clue to much. To want to be liked by everybody does not merely mean amiability; it connotes will to power, for the obvious reason that if the process is carried on long enough and enough people like the person, his power eventually becomes infinite and universal. Conversely, any man with great will to power and sense of historical mission, like Roosevelt, not only likes to be liked; he has to be liked, in order to feed his ego. But FDR went beyond this; he wanted to be liked not only by contemporaries on as broad a scale as possible, but by posterity. This, among others, is one reason for his collector's instinct. He collected himself—for history. He wanted to be spoken of well by succeeding generations, which means that he had the typical great man's wish for immortality, and hence—as we shall see in a subsequent chapter—he preserved everything about himself that might be of the slightest interest to historians. His passion for collecting and cataloguing is also a suggestive indication of his optimism. He was quite content to put absolutely everything on the record, without fear of what the world verdict of history would be.”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History

“Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...

reminded one more of great Atlantic rollers than human formations. Clouds of cavalry, avalanches of field-guns and—at that time a novelty—squadrons of motor-cars (private and military) completed the array. For five hours the immense defilade continued. Yet this was only a twentieth of the armed strength of the regular German Army before mobilization.

Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Churchill and Roosevelt loved cats. Hitler and Napoleon hated them. That was a vastly reductive view on the matter, obviously, but it told you a lot.”
― Tom Cox

“There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation').”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“It's a pushing age," Churchill wrote his mother as a young man, "and we must shove with the rest." It may well be that Winston Churchill was the greatest pusher in history. His life spanned the final calvary charge of the British Empire, which he witnesses as a young war correspondent in 1898, and ended well into the nuclear age, indeed the space age, both of which he helped usher in. His first trip to America was on a steamship (to be introduces on stage by Mark Twain, no less) and his final one was on a Boeing 707 that flew 500 miles per hour. In between he saw two world wars, the invention of the car, radio, and rock and roll, and countless trials and triumphs.”
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key

“It was night time, Inspector Thompson wrote. Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for two years. My heart filled.”
― Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

“Adolf Hitler had no special animus toward Britain or its empire, and indeed imagined a division of the world into spheres of interests. He expected Churchill to come to terms after the fall of France. Churchill did not. He told the French that "whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“En un primer momento, el líder principal de la coalición antihitleriana fue Winston Churchill, quien siempre confesó que, de haber sido un ciudadano español, habría apoyado a Franco.”
― Stanley G. Payne, En defensa de España: Desmontando mitos y leyendas negras

“Those who fail to learn from the past abate its triumphs.”
― Rayvern White

“During World War II pets were allowed aboard British war ships and Blackie was the HMS Prince of Wales's ship's pet cat. . In August 1941 he became famous after the ship carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to Canada where he net Franklin D. Roosevelt to agree on the Atlantic Charter.
After the declaration of the Charter, as Churchill prepared to depart from the ship, Blackie approached him at the gangway and bid Prime Minister Churchill farewell. In honor of that moment Blackie was renamed Churchill.
Later Blackie survived the sinking of Prince of Wales by the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service later that year, and was rescued and taken to Singapore with the other survivors”
― Captain Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba

“I have lost my heart! … Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Zionism Versus Bolshevism

“She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. "Look at this, Yukio," Molly whispers, leaning into the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jay-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. "They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to haul the leaves up, and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together, and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they're carrying to stick all the leaves in place.

Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. "Hmm."

"See the bridge?" Molly asks. The ants had built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them. "I wish that fella Adolf Hitler could see this," Molly whispers.

"Hitler?" Yukio echoes confused.

"Yeah," Molly says. "We could get Hitler and what's-his-name—Musolino—"

"Mussolini," Yukio says.

"Yeah! Mussolini," Molly says. "We get Hitler, Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Winston himself lived ninety years without once drawing his own bath or riding on a bus. He took the tube just once. His wife had to send a party to rescue him; helpless, he was whirling round and round the tunnels under London.”
― William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

“And in at least one instance his defiance was admirable. Public-school boys then were ashamed of their nannies. They would no sooner have invited one to Harrow than an upper-class American boy today would bring his teddy bear to his boarding school. Winston not only asked Woom to come; he paraded his old nurse, immensely fat and all smiles, down High Street, and then unashamedly kissed her in full view of his schoolmates. One of them was Seely, who later became a cabinet colleague of Winston’s and won the DSO in France. Seely called that kiss “one of the bravest acts I have ever seen.”
― 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

“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

“Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like to be taught. -- W. S. Churchill”
― Richard Steyn, Churchill & Smuts: The Friendship

“Every generation has its fraudsters like Edison,
Every generation has trashy maniacs like Columbus.
Every generation has war-merchants like Kissinger,
Every generation has its churchillian doofus.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“The west has systematically peddled
morons and monkeys as kings heroic,
white suffering is human suffering, while
the colored belong on national geographic.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“Old man, if nature is generous, why this famine? He said, Blame human nature that makes merchants hoard and Churchill take our rice for his troops while we starve.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Modern man, especially modern urban intellectual man, without a sense of history or blood soil - the words Hitler's distortion made anathema - understood poorly the seemingly inexorable cycles of human conduct. Men such as Churchill, nonintellectual but brilliant, were not cleverer than the best minds of the West. But they tended to see what was, and not what should be.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This kind of peace