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Winston Churchill
510 quotes
“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in the House of Commons, November 5, 1919; as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 355
“Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920; "Amritsar
“Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British Pharmacopaeia.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920; "Amritsar
“I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In "Painting as a Pastime", first published in the Strand Magazine in two parts (December 1921/January 1922), cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 456
“He ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1688 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Referring to Mahatma Gandhi in conversation with Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 1921. Reported in Stephanie Barczewsk, John Eglin, Stephen Heathorn, Michael Silvestri, and Michelle Tusan, Britain Since 168…
“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and the glory of the climb.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In "Painting as a Pastime", the Strand Magazine (December 1921/January 1922), cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 568
“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remark in 1923 after rejoining the Conservatives, having left them earlier to join the Liberals; reported in Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill (1966), p. 52–53. Other sources say this remark was made in 1924.
“The enthronement in office of a Socialist Government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great States only on the morrow of defeat in war. It will delay the return of prosperity; it will check enterprise and impair credit; it will open a period of increasing political confusion and disturbance.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to a correspondent shortly before the Labour Party formed its first government (17 January 1924), quoted in The Times (18 January 1924), p. 14
“Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pall Mall Gazette (1924) on HG Wells' suggestion of an atomic bomb, in "BBC Article
“By abandoning the naval base at Singapore the Socialist Government has made it impossible for the British Navy to enter the Pacific, and consequently to afford the slightest assistance to Australia and New Zealand, no matter how terrible their need might be. Yet almost at the same time that the British Navy is stripped of its old power of defending the British Empire we know well that they would gladly hawk it round Europe to be the drudge of an international organization and fight in every quarrel but its own.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
“I am most anxious that in dealing with matters which every Member knows are extremely delicate matters, I should not use any phrase or expression which would cause offence to our friends and Allies on the Continent or across the Atlantic Ocean.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speaking on inter-Allied debts in the House of Commons (10 December 1924); reported in Parliamentary Debates (Commons) (1925), 5th series, vol. 179, col. 259.
“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: During a debate with Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden (June 23, 1925); Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James, Chelsea House ed., vol. 4 (1922–1928), p. 3706
“The follies of Socialism are inexhaustible... Even among themselves they have twenty discordant factions who hate one another even more than they hate you and me. Their insincerity! Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant presumption of superiority of these people?.... Then when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings but to a level which is even far below the average.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the Town Hall, Battersea (11 December 1925); Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, Vol. IV, p. 3821
“Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech (1922–1928); Complete Speeches, 1897-1963 (1974), Chelsea House, Vol. IV, p. 3462
“Let them [Socialists] abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality... they will increase the well-being of the world.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech (21 January 1926); Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, Vol. IV, p. 3821
“I have never taken the view which seems to give so much pleasure to morbid and misanthropic minds, a view which they have spread so widely through the United States, that Britain is "down and out," that the foundations of her commercial and industrial greatness have been sapped, that the stamina of her people is impaired, that her workmen are mutinous and lazy, that her employers are pleasure-loving and benighted, that her institutions are crumbling, and that her Empire is falling to pieces.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Ulster Hall, Belfast (2 March 1926), quoted in The Times (3 March 1926), p. 21
“I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons, July 7, 1926 "Emergency Services", responding to criticism that he edited the British Gazette in a biased manner during the General Strike, as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006),…
“Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you — another "British Gazette.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons, July 7, 1926; "Emergency Services"; at this time, Churchill was serving as Chancellor of the Excheqer under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
“Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of stabilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Press statement from Rome (20 January 1927), as quoted in Introduction: A Political-Biographical Sketch by Tariq Ali in Class War Conservatism and Other Essays (2015) by Ralph Miliband, with date of quote given in Go Be…
“Although trade is important, there are other and stronger bonds of Empire, and since the Conference of 1926 nothing but common interests and traditions have held the Empire together. But those are mighty ties, incomprehensible to Europeans, which have drawn millions of men from the far corners of the earth to the battlefields of France, and we must trust to them to continue to draw us together.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Toronto (16 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (1981; 2012), p. 51
“Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Randolph Churchill's diary entry (24 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (1981; 2012), p. 55
“The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny, and internecine war and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Article for the Daily Mail (16 November 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 356
“Arabs would have sat in the dark forever had not the Zionist engineers harnessed the Jordan river for electrification. Now they swarm into Palestine in seeking the light. (1922)”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Great War through which we have passed differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. ... Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1911–1914: Chapter I (The Vials of Wrath), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 10-11
“We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs....The king's ships were at sea.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1911–1914: Chapter IX (The Crisis), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 212-213
“He was a cut flower in a vase; fair to see, yet bound to die, and to die very soon if the water was not constantly renewed.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter XIII (On The Oceans), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), p. 295
“There is always a strong case for doing nothing, especially for doing nothing yourself.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1911–1914: Chapter XV (Antwerp), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), p. 340
“Eaten bread is soon forgotten. Dangers which are warded off by effective precautions and foresight are never even remembered.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1911–1914: Chapter XVII (The Grand Fleet and the Submarine Alarm), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), p. 399
“Mechanical not less than strategic conditions had combined to produce at this early period in the war a deadlock both on sea and land. The strongest fleet was paralysed in its offensive by the menace of the mine and the torpedo. The strongest army was arrested in its advance by the machine gun......The mechanical danger must be overcome by a mechanical remedy.....Something must be discovered which would render ships immune from the torpedo, and make it unnecessary for soldiers to bare their breasts to the machine-gun hail.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1915: Chapter I (The Deadlock in the West), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 22-23
“Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part I: Chapter V (Jutland: The Preliminaries), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), pp. 112
“Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part II: Chapter XXIII (Victory), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), p. 544
“An infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia; a Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slew the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroyed the health and even the souls of nations.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Aftermath, by Winston Churchill (1929), p. 274
“Great Britain could have no other object but to use her whole influence and resources consistently over a long period of years to weave France and Germany so closely together economically, socially and morally, as to prevent the occasion of quarrels and make their causes die in a realization of mutual prosperity and interdependence.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, The Aftermath: Chapter XX (The End of the World Crisis), Churchill, Butterworth (1929), p. 457
“The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives, and though each had ardent advocates, most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre — horrid and inexorcisable.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World Crisis, Volume V: the Aftermath (1929), Churchill, Butterworth (London).
“She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly — but at a distance.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My early life, 1874–1904 (1930), Churchill, Winston S., p. 45 (1996 Touchstone Edition),
“Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I then had one of the three or four long intimate conversations with him which are all I can boast.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although always prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it should be postponed.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man's Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk — and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They knew so much more about the controversy than I did, that my bold broad generalities about liberty, equality and fraternity got seriously knocked about. I entrenched myself around the slogan "No slavery under the Union Jack." Slavery they suggested might be right or wrong: the Union Jack was no doubt a respectable piece of bunting: but what was the moral connection between the two? I had the same difficulty in discovering a foundation for the assertions I so confidently made, as I have found in arguing with the people who contend that the sun is only a figment of our imagination.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source