Quotes About History

I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

When I warned [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, "In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." Some chicken; some neck.

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.

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

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and the Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

This was their finest hour

The year that Hitler came into power the prestigious Oxford Union, a student debating society, overwhelmingly approved a motion stating that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country," and within a short period similar resolutions were adopted by most of England's other colleges and universities. When

He also had five 18-pounder siege guns as well as the dangerous rifled Whitworth gun that could crack a level shot a mile and more with terrifying accuracy.

There were a million British casualties in the first three months of the war.)

by the end of the war American warplanes were dropping seventeen hundred tons of bombs a day on Japanese cities.

One GI quipped (after Churchill) that "Never in the field of human conflict have so few been commanded by so many, from so far away.

Germany," Lindbergh said, "had the ambitious drive of America, but that drive was headed for war.

Whereas the rulers of Germany in 1914 and her allies who provoked World War I were—to use the term in its most generous sense—at least "gentlemen," the leaders of the Axis powers in 1941 were thugs. They were, most of them, amoral murderers and brutish torturers who gained power through assassination and corruption, and more than sixty years after the fact this remains a stubborn truth.

By 1938 much of the New Deal was dead. The programs that were not killed by the Supreme Court had been killed by Congress, which had seen the election of a significant number of conservatives.

Americans have seen fit to elect twelve generals to the U.S. presidency, but even before there was a United States of America generals ruled the earth. Take

It was one of the bloodiest battles in history, and one of the most historic. Kursk is generally viewed as the turning point in the Second World War in Europe, for the Germans never again launched a successful offensive.

Tennessee to places like Corinth, Nashville, and even Shiloh, which at that point he'd never heard of.

General Fuller ignored in this theory the lessons later learned by those same Allies against Nazi Germany and Japan.

They had graduated from cloth-and-wood flying machines in the dawn of human flight to steel and aluminum behemoths with thousands of horsepower and terrific firepower;

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything and is, therefore, a particularly compelling symbol of civilisation. (Attributed to Ralph Caplan)

Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.