Quotes from Andrew Roberts

Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.

At one dinner he [George Smith Patton] toasted his officers' wives with the words: 'My, what pretty widows you're going to make.

Certainly the fighting around the huge water-tanks on the hillside was continuous for 112 days from the second half of September to 12 January 1943. Historians simply cannot say, or even estimate, how often the summit changed hands, for, as Chuikov notes, there were no witnesses who survived all through the whole battle for it, and in any case no one was keeping count. At one point the life expectancy of soldiers there was between one and two days, and to see a third day made one a veteran.

The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.

the first time that Churchill dialled a telephone number himself was when he was seventy-three. 13 (It was to the speaking clock, which he thanked politely.)

On THE DECSIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS 109 The epic struggle between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109 upon which so much of western civilization depended in the summer of 1940 has found the ideal biographer in David Isby. I write "biographer" because, like the men who flew these remarkable fighter planes, Isby sees them in almost human terms, transcending the mere mechanical. (Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War )

We owe to the Jews,' wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, 'a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.

I am arrogant,' he once said of himself in a perceptive piece of self-analysis, 'but not conceited.

Israel is denounced as a colonial State, an artificial state, a new state, as though that's unusual in the region. Jordan, Syria and Iraq all owe their genesis to the 1920s rather than the ancient mists of Time

I realized that I must be on my best behaviour,' as he later put it, 'punctual, subdued, reserved; in short, display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.

It was felt that to admit defeat at the hands of a Muslim power would weaken the British Empire, which ruled over tens of millions of Muslims Ã¢â'¬â€œ and in India particularly prestige was more important than sheer military power.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees the others.

In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable. Churchill

In April, Churchill decided he should try to alter his speaking style, to make it less sonorous and Victorian, to avoid sounding pompous to younger listeners. At sixty, he was an old dog to be learning new oratorical tricks

Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away Ã¢â'¬â€œ you may put money in the pocket of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way.

The most important was not to threaten to resign unless one is prepared to go into the wilderness. If one is not so prepared, then only threaten to resign along with several other people capable of bringing down the Government.

You would rise in the world? . . . You must work while others amuse themselves. Are you desirous of a reputation for courage? You must risk your life. Churchill, Savrola

Revenge may be sweet, but it is also most expensive

Nothing is lost while courage remains.

Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which tamely surrendered were finished.

This is a time to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged safe by conventional standards.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that when nations are strong they are not always just, and when they wish to be just they are often no longer strong

Yet in all the anxiety of these days Churchill never lost his sense of humour. When an MP asked him on 8 June to ensure that the same mistakes over reparations were not made after victory that had been made after the Great War, the Prime Minister assured him that 'That is most fully in our minds. I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated. We shall probably make another set of mistakes.

Churchill loathed Communism because of the attack it made 'on the human spirit and human rights', he said in July 1920. '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.