Quotes About Churchill

To reduce the desperately difficult moral decisions that Churchill and many others had to take to the level of accusations of deliberate genocide is biased and unhistorical.

Churchill refused the King's third offer of the Order of the Garter, supposedly saying afterwards, 'Why should I accept the Order of the Garter from His Majesty when the people have just given me the order of the boot?

When Averell Harriman tried to console Churchill by saying that under the proportional representation system he would still have been prime minister, of a Conservative–Liberal coalition, he indignantly rejected the idea, saying, 'I will fight against the evils of proportional representation with all my strength,' and explained that democracy could succeed only if the people knew which party was accountable and responsible for the decisions taken in government

The interpretation Churchill gave to the obligations of aristocracy was that he and his class had a profound responsibility towards his country, which had the right to expect his lifelong service to it.

It had taken two years and two general elections, but now the elected House of Commons was supreme over the hereditary and appointed House of Lords. Churchill had negotiated much of the eventual deal. It made him deeply distrusted and disliked among the Tory Diehards, and by many of his own class, but it brought Britain closer to becoming a fully functioning modern democracy.

The House of Lords finally passed the Parliament Bill on 10 August 1911. It had taken two years and two general elections, but now the elected House of Commons was supreme over the hereditary and appointed House of Lords. Churchill had negotiated much of the eventual deal. It made him deeply distrusted and disliked among the Tory Diehards, and by many of his own class, but it brought Britain closer to becoming a fully functioning modern democracy.

Stalin did not trust Churchill, because he did not trust anyone (except, for two years, Adolf Hitler).

Stalin did not trust Churchill, because he did not trust anyone (except, for two years, Adolf Hitler). Yet Churchill could not discover Stalin's true views about him because after June 1941 Britain's intelligence services were ordered not to spy on Britain's new Soviet ally, a mistaken policy that was certainly not reciprocated.

It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,' Churchill later wrote of the moment the Great War ended.

As soon as the war ended, Churchill immediately set about writing The World Crisis. It was to be packed with lessons for the future. 'No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion,' he wrote. 'No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.

Churchill created the Royal Naval Air Service, which had fifty planes by 1914, and pioneered the concept of aerial bombing of Zeppelin airship aerodromes and German lines of communication. The first successful launch of a plane off the deck of a battleship took place in January 1912, and some military historians see Churchill as the father of the modern aircraft carrier.

have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940

In 1923 Churchill wrote Clementine 'A Dissertation on Dining Room Chairs' which stated that 'The Dining Room chair has certain very marked requisites.' It needed to be comfortable, have arms and be compact, and the back had to be 'almost perpendicularly over the legs'.37 There also needed to be no fewer than twenty of them. Meals around the circular table in Chartwell's

Churchill had an extraordinary capacity for alcohol and it rarely affected his judgement.

The breadth of Churchill's hinterland – his many and varied interests beyond politics – meant that he could regard politics with more detachment than most professional politicians, and thus not make the compromises others did in order to gain, or remain in, office.

there could hardly have been very good Anglo-French relations after 3 July 1940, when Churchill permitted the Royal Navy to bombard the Vichy fleet at Oran in Algeria, in order to try to prevent it sailing for French ports and thence possible incorporation into the Kriegsmarine.

When Churchill was twenty, the British Empire covered more than one-fifth of the earth's land surface

I don't write huge books any more. I used to write 1,000 printed pages, but now I write short books. I did one on Napoleon, 50,000 words - enjoyed doing that. He was a baddie. I did one on Churchill, which was a bestseller in New York, I'm glad to say. 50,000 words. He was a goodie.

Churchill's career was littered with oratorical disasters when he misjudged the audience.

If you look at the copies of Churchill's speeches that have survived, they are heavily marked up. He was scrupulous about the impact of each word. He preferred short words and the repetition of short words. He knew everything about the techniques of rhetoric.

The German leaders, said Winston Churchill, turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

True genius, Churchill taught us, resides in the capacity to evaluate conflicting information.

Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define.

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars.