Quotes About History

It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war. But this is probably true of other departments and of other countries, and it was certainly true of the French Army.

In the twelve months from June, 1940, to June, 1941, our civilian casualties were 43,381 killed and 50,856 seriously injured, a total of 94,237. Except for

I have made more bishops than anyone since St. Augustine.

I saw them before you were born. I came here first in 1900. [Reporter: "Do they look the same?"] Well, the principle seems the same. The water still keeps falling over. 1943, NIAGARA FALLS.

he would in any case have saved the British Army in France from the futile slaughter of May, and possibly even discouraged the French from the long and frightful follies of their Spring offensive in Artois in which they squandered nearly a quarter of a million men.

history is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind;

And history while for the warning of vehement high, and during natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce that among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid name.

The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth: their next worst—his death.

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.

I saw quite plainly that Communism would be the peril civilisation would have to face after the defeat of Nazism and Fascism.

Gunpowder, which we have seen used in the puny bombards which, according to some authorities, Edward had fired at Crécy and against Calais, was soon decisively to establish itself as a practical factor in war and in human affairs based on war. If cannon had not been invented the English mastery of the long-bow might have carried them even farther in their Continental domination.

The problems of the second year of war must be dealt with by the experience of the first year of war. The problems of the third year of war must be met by results observed and understood in the second, and so on.

Few indeed are the instances in history of a river-line athwart the advance of a superior army proving an effective defence

In Norman days far more definitely than in Saxon the governing class is a landowning class.

If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.

In 1933 the students of the Oxford Union, under the inspiration of a Mr. Joad, passed their ever-shameful resolution, "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.

The following French defence has been made, and it cannot be lightly dismissed. If Czechoslovakia had refused to submit, and war had resulted, France would have fulfilled her obligations; but if the Czechs chose to give in under whatever pressures were administered French honour was saved. We must leave this to the judgment of history.

If the present," I said a few weeks later, "tries to sit in judgment on the past it will lose the future.

all the great struggles of history have been won by superior will-power wresting victory in the teeth of odds or upon the narrowest of margins.

when our lives have faded, history will pronounce its cool, detached, and shadowy verdict.

Here we stir the embers of the past and light the beacons of the future. Old flags are raised anew; the passions of vanished generations awake; beneath the shell-torn soil of the twentieth century the bones of long dead warriors and victims are exposed, and the wail of lost causes sounds in the wind.

the United States, allowed conditions to be gradually built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most. They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behaviour towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us to-day to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale.

Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.

there followed a period lasting for about three months of Turkish hesitation and delay, having the effect of consummate duplicity