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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Humpty Dumpty (Colonial Sonnet)

Humpty Dumpty sat on a throne,
he made a career of divide-n-rule.
Whole west found a savior in a fool,
as he was anointed the royal mule.

He smuggled food from starving natives,
for fighting troops were far more worthy.
Adolf was designated the villain supremo,
while he was the free world's beloved Humpty.

It's fault of the natives to "breed like rabbits",
he was right to be their judge and executioner.
After all, human rights mean rights of the pale,
freedom and equality don't apply to the darker.

Humpty Dumpty was ready with his cigar,
to fight the invaders on the beaches.
Sure he was the right nut for the job,
expertise lies in centuries of practice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“By the time he came into Downing Street in May 1940 he had written and read so much history as to have a unique understanding of events, to see them in context, and to see what England must do.”
― Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor

“Tell him I’m on the privy and can take only one shit at a time.”
― William Manchester, LAST LION: WINSTON S. CHURCHILL ALONE

“The object of this book is not to show that Hitler and his confederates were saints or that National Socialism was an ideal or even a desirable form of government. Its aim is a less ambitious one—to demonstrate that the rise of National Socialism was due in the main to the blind and revengeful policy of the Allies; that National Socialism, whatever its defects, saved first Germany and later Spain from becoming bulwarks of Communism; that the Western Powers under Roosevelt’s guidance did everything possible in the pre-War years to drive the German leaders to extremes; that the Roosevelt-Churchill policy of annihilating Germany as a military power served the interests of Communism and of Communism alone; that the “war crimes” were the work of a small band of fanatics; and that the German people as a whole were guilty of nothing more criminal than of defending their country in time of war.”
― Charles Bewley, Hermann Goring and the Third Reich; A Biography Based on Family and Official Records

“The shores of History are strewn with the wrecks of Empires.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Churchill By Himself

“You should be more disgusted at Churchill and Columbus than Hitler, the fact that you are not, shows how ludicrously little you're aware of humanitarian disasters.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim

“El libro de 2054 páginas de Churchill "Segunda Guerra Mundial" no menciona el genocidio o el asesinato de judíos. Casualmente, Churchill fue un firme defensor de la legislación eugenésica antes del estallido de la segunda guerra mundial.”
― A.E. Samaan, Thoughts in the Ether: Pensamientos en el Éter