Quotes from Winston S. Churchill

The world today is ruled by harassed politicians absorbed in getting into office or turning out the other man so that not much room is left for debating the great issues on their merits

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides.

This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.

Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

I am a man of simple tastes easily satisfied with the best

Those who never change their minds, never change anything.

Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.

During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

Be a peg, hammered into the frozen ground, immovable.

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.

I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and 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 why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.

I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations

I love to learn but I do not want to be taught