Quotes About History

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that when nations are strong they are not always just, and when they wish to be just they are often no longer strong

Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft. Churchill

His high, uplifting oratory during the Second World War was clearly prefigured more than thirty years earlier.

This was a time when it was equally good to live or die. Churchill, Their Finest Hour

Only one thing in history is certain: that Mankind is unteachable.

journalism is the first draft of history

Andrew Roberts

It might be unpalatable in our more egalitarian era to admit it, but Churchill became prime minister by a process that was far from democratic.

El único caso en el que creo ver el dedo de Dios en la historia contemporánea es el de la llegada de Churchill al más alto cargo de la nación en ese preciso momento de 1940».

Hitler had done quite enough in his career to prove how utterly untrustworthy he was long before the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed in August 1939, yet as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out: 'Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler.

What is now clear', wrote Leslie Rowan a quarter of a century later, 'is that Greece would not have been a free country had it not been for Churchill's courage and grasp of the essential.

The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.

one of the most important I ever wrote', asking for arms to be lent or leased to Britain under a programme whereby Britain would repay the United States over the very long term.153 (Even he would probably not have guessed that the final instalment of the loan, of $83.25 million, would only be repaid in 2006.)

Churchill sustituyó la religión ortodoxa por una fe laica en el progreso histórico, con un marcado énfasis en la misión civilizadora de Inglaterra y el imperio británico».

A country like my own, Britain – which still occupies Gilbraltar captured in the 18th century, the Falklands captured in the 19th century and the Channel Islands which belonged to France until 1468, and rightly so in each case – is being absurdly hypocritical when it criticises Israel for retaining territory vital to her survival, which Gilbraltar, the Falklands and the Channel Island certainly aren't to Britain's.

la ausencia de la fe cristiana había determinado que el credo churchilliano girase en torno al imperio británico.

Great men are seldom nice men.

There is a fascinating dichotomy in that, although the appeasement movement was intended to prevent another war breaking out, most of its leaders had not seen action in the Great War, whereas most of the anti-appeasers had.

Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August 15, 1769.

Paul Nash's 1941 painting The Battle of Britain

He pronounced that novels were 'for ladies' maids' and ordered the librarian, 'Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.

The Italian city-state of Genoa had nominally ruled Corsica for over two centuries, but rarely tried to extend her control beyond the coastal towns into the mountainous interior, where the Corsicans were fiercely independent. In 1755 Corsica's charismatic nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli, proclaimed an independent republic, a notion that became

One of the pieces of advice that Churchill had given Georges Clemenceau during the Great War had been 'to forget old quarrels … In England we … make many muddles, but we always keep more or less together.

Andrew Roberts