Quotes from Geoffrey Wheatcroft

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.

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.

Men run with great avidity to give their evidence in favour of what flatters their passions and national prejudices,' David Hume told Edward Gibbon.

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

In sharp contradiction to Kipling, Mark Twain had no wish to succeed the British in any imperial role. He abhorred what his country had done to the people of the Philippines as much as what the British had done to the Boers, and so he finished introducing his English guest with the playfully reproachful words: 'We are kin. And now that we are kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired.

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