Quotes from Winston S. Churchill

Now all our hope is to regulate the unthinkable. Regulated unthinkability—that is the proposal now; and very soon it will be a question of making up our minds to unregulated unthinkability.

Never flinch, never weary, never despair.

Of course the introduction of conscription at this stage did not give us an army. It only applied to the men of twenty years of age; they had still to be trained; and after they had been trained they had still to be armed.

The moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions…No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul.

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.

all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God.

In the first three months of actual fighting from the last week in August to the end of November, when the German drive against the Channel ports had come to an end and the first great invasion was definitely arrested, the French lost in killed, prisoners and wounded 854,0001 men. In

The truth deserves a bodyguard of lies.

some day, in a time of shame and trouble, a second great Prophet will arise—a Mahdi who shall lead the faithful nearer God and sustain the religion.

Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat—88

Gandhi... 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. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.

In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision. Ludendorff refers to it with bated breath. ... They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth" fitted England very accurately during these years.

I should be unworthy of your confidence and generosity if I did not still cry: Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is done and the whole world is safe and clean.

If food is scarce, why isn't Gandhi dead yet?

A wit wrote ten years ago: "The leaders of thought have reached the horizons of human reason, but all the wires are down, and they can only communicate with us by unintelligible signals.

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.

3760we will fight them on the beaches

It is not a question of one General being better than another, but of one General being better than two.

In this period, almost equal to that which separates us from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, well-to-do persons in Britain lived better than they ever did until late Victorian times. From the year 400 till the year 1900 no one had central heating and very few had hot baths.

Those who have served in small ships will realize the skill, faithfulness and hardihood required to carry out this duty day after day, month after month, in wild weather and wintry seas without breakdown or failure.

Wyclif, who died in 1384, had appealed to the conscience of his age. Baffled, though not silenced, in England, his inspiration stirred a distant and little-known land, and thence disturbed Europe. Students from Prague had come to Oxford, and carried his doctrines, and indeed the manuscripts of his writings, to Bohemia. From this sprang the movement by which the fame of John Huss eclipsed that of his English master and evoked the enduring national consciousness of the Czech people.

The grass soon grows over a battlefield but never over a scaffold.